Evaluating the performance of highway concessions through public-private partnerships using a fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making procedure

This paper presents a procedure to assist the analysis of the performance of highway concessions through public-private partnerships with the combined use of quantitative and linguistic variables, differing from the traditional evaluation that uses only quantitative variables in its applications. The proposed procedure uses fuzzy logic to model the linguistic variables that represent the importance of the performance evaluation categories. The procedure was applied in two Brazilian highway concessions through public-private partnerships, the concessionaires AB Nascentes das Gerais (MG-050, BR-491 and BR-265 highways) and Rota dos Coqueiros (PE-024 highway), in which weights were evaluated among the performance evaluation categories from the perspective of specialists in the field of transport engineering. The two highway concessions present the same categories of performance evaluation (that is, operational, environmental, financial and social), facilitating the application of the proposed procedure. The results show that in the evaluation of the specialists there is a tendency to attribute greater importance to the operational category in relation to the other three categories and that the current concession contracts of the two case studies are not the most adequate to present the weights of categories considering the views of experts.