Question

What is “Decision Analysis”? To what use would you put in the Transport Sector?

Answer 1

A systematic, quantitative and visual approach to addressing and evaluating important choices confronted by businesses. Decision analysis utilizes a variety of tools to evaluate all relevant information to aid in the decision making process.

The most common Decision making methodology applied so far to the evaluation of transport sector has been conventional cost-benefit analysis (CBA),which supported by traffic- and impact model calculations provides the decision-makers with a monetary assessment of the project’s feasibility.A socioeconomic analysis is in this respect a further development of the traditional CBA capturing the economic value of social benefits by translating social objectives into financial measures of benefits. Internationally seen there has been a growing awareness over the recent years that besides the social costs and benefits associated with transport other impacts that are more difficult to monetise should also have influence on the decision making process.Another decision making mothodology is multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), which is a coherent, well-structured, flexible, straight forward evaluation method, taking into account all the requirements of a transport infrastructure project.