Exploring public transport sustainability with neutrosophic logic

ABSTRACT

Sustainable transportation is a significant component of overall sustainable development. Increasingly, evaluation and decision-making with respect to major complex projects (for example, transportation and land use projects), a multiple attribute perspective is taken. This paper illustrates a multiple attribute decision-making approach for selecting sustainable public transportation systems under uncertainty, that is, with partial or incomplete information represented by single-valued neutrosophic sets (SVNSs). A SVNS is a generalization of a classical set, a fuzzy set, and an intuitionistic fuzzy set. Here, SVNSs and SVNS connectives are illustrated in the context of a ‘Public Transit Sustainable Mobility Analysis Tool’ (PTSMAT) which involves a composite (multiple attribute) sustainability index. A case study of PTSMAT is provided for the UBC Corridor study in Vancouver, Canada. As expected, similar results are obtained to the original study, though the neutrosophic formalism opens a wide range of possibilities for recognition of uncertainty in sustainability assessment.

KEYWORDS:

• Neutrosophic set
• sustainability
• public transport
• multiattribute decision
• Public Transit Sustainable Mobility Analysis Tool
• case study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Phillip Smith http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7887-9551