Combining Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) with role-playing games for stakeholder engagement in complex transport decisions

This paper presents a procedure for the structuring of a transport decision-making problem and evaluation of the solutions proposed from a multi-stakeholder multi-criteria perspective. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used as multicriteria decision technique, while a role-playing game is used to reproduce a participatory process where University students act as key stakeholders. The case study regards the building of a new metro station in Catania (Italy), which will be the nearest station to a big University district. A dedicated transit system linking the metro station and the district is under study and four different alternatives have been proposed. Students were initially informed about the objectives of key stakeholders in order to be able to play the different roles. A hierarchy of the problem was built with them and AHP was used to elicit their preferences and evaluate priorities for each stakeholder group. A comparison between a mathematical aggregation of individual priorities and a consensus vote was performed to verify the differences between the two different methods and their compliance with the stated stakeholder preferences. AHP-based participatory procedure proved to be suitable to tackle the complexity of transport decisions.