PRIORITIZING INDIAN RAILWAY STATIONS USING MODIFIED ROUGH AHP-MABAC METHOD

What is it about?

This study proposes a hybrid multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) methodology for evaluating the performance of the Indian railway stations (IRS). Since the customers are heterogeneous and their requirements are often imprecise, the evaluation process is a critical step for prioritizing the IRS. To improve the existing approaches, an efficient evaluation technique has been proposed by integrating rough numbers, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and multi-attribute border approximation area comparison (MABAC) methods in the rough environment. The relative criteria weights based on their preferences given by experts is determined by rough AHP whereas the evaluation of the alternatives based on these criteria is done by the modified rough MABAC method. A case study of prioritizing different railway stations in India is provided to demonstrate the efficiency and applicability of the proposed method. Among different criteria “proactively” is observed to be the most important criteria in our analysis, followed by ‘Railfanning’ and ‘DMO’ is found to be the best among the forty IRS in this study. Finally, a comparative analysis and validity testing of the proposed method is elaborated and the methodology provides a standard to select IRS on the basis of different criteria.

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Why is it important?

 Development of a hierarchical and methodological procedure with step-wise derivation dealing with vague and subjective information in an MCDM applied to evaluate the IR stations.  The modified rough AHP-MABAC method consists of a comprehensive, rational and sensible algorithmic methodology.  Enlightening the overall performances with a quantitative analysis which help in classifying both the best, the worst, and borderline performers (stations) in IR system.  A flexible multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) framework that can also be applied to other MCDM problems irrespective of the case study.  This ranking method will enable IR station managers, IR administration and policymakers in governing the IR system to the global standards with proper evaluation and prioritization.

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