Decision-Making Framework for Prioritizing the Improvement of Pedestrian Facilities in Urban Areas Using Integrated Delphi, AHP, and TOPSIS Approach

The existing pedestrian facilities in urban areas can be improved by prioritizing the areas based on their infrastructure performance, location, safety, mobility, and liveability aspects. This paper aims to present a combination of Delphi, analytic hierarchy process (AHP), and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) for prioritizing the improvement of pedestrian facilities in an urban area. The approach has been broken into three stages. Firstly, the significant factor assessment was done by the Delphi method. Secondly, AHP was applied to estimate the relative weightage of each factor. Finally, the TOPSIS method was used to rank the alternatives in preparation for the final decision. For better understanding, the proposed method was demonstrated by applying the framework in a case study. The analyses revealed that the proposed method is effective for prioritizing the improvement of pedestrian facilities in an urban area. The method described in this paper is intended to assist decision makers in ranking different sidewalk stretches in the urban areas that need to be improved based on various attributes. This paper makes a major impact by incorporating a novel approach for the decision making of pedestrian facilities improvement, which considered both subjective and objective judgments of multiple decision makers in the procedure at various stages using different multi-criteria decision making techniques. This approach can be combined with a scheduling methodology and optimization technique to increase the efficiency of the resource allocation process.