The Holistic Approach to Urban Mobility Planning with a Modified Focus Group, SWOT, and Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchical Process

Abstract

The urban mobility system is an important factor in social development and must, therefore, be tackled in a way that enables balanced, sustainable development. The purpose of the present work was to introduce a new holistic approach to urban mobility system (UMS) planning, which involves a strategic decision-making process with a broad involvement of various stakeholders. For this purpose, an innovative model was created by synthesizing the focus group (FG) method with the nominal group technique (NGT), SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis, and the fuzzy analytical hierarchical process (FAHP) method. The fuzzy approach was chosen for its ability to incorporate imprecise and vague information and make a decision-making UMS process more realistic. Accordingly, the objective of the paper was to propose a newly developed model that will (considering the integration of various urban mobility subsystems) enable the detection, identification, and ranking of key priorities required for a more holistic approach to UMS planning. The results revealed that the developed integrated model enables acquired areas to be ranked according to priorities, which further allows the development of scenarios. Moreover, the model allows a better understanding of how to search for compromises when one is faced with multi-criteria decision-making and coordination of frequently contradictory goals. A new integrated urban mobility model, as proposed herein, was also successfully tested in a real-life application, which proves its potential for use in sustainable urban mobility planning in a holistic way.

Sustainable development goals assessment of Erzurum province with SWOT-AHP analysis

“…There is a substantially broad literature on broadening the scope of SWOT-AHP based on sustainable development, economy, industry, supply chain and selection practices in terms of economic and social sustainability (Awasthi et al, 2018 ; Bas, 2013 ; Calabrese et al, 2019 ; Centobelli et al, 2017 ; Dania et al, 2018 ; Govindan et al, 2014 , 2020a , 2020b , 2020c ; Kim & Park, 2019 ; Lenis Escobar et al, 2020 ; Mangla et al, 2018 ; Mani et al, 2014 ; Raza et al, 2018 ; Tavana et al, 2016 ). There have been numerous attempts elaborating on the AHP and SWOT connection within the scope of environmentally sustainable development such as the selection of potential areas and suitable routes in various areas according to geographic features (Coruhlu et al, 2020 ; Datta, 2020 ; De La Vega et al, 2018 ; Kumari & Pandey, 2020 ), sustainable environmental relationship and appropriate agricultural land location selection (Feng, 2020 ; Sarı & Koyuncu, 2021 ), sustainable energy and environmental impact assessment (Anser et al, 2020 ; Ervural et al, 2018 ; Solangi et al, 2019 ; Wang et al, 2020 ), natural resource sustainability (Kajanus et al, 2012 ), sustainable tourism (Asadpourian et al, 2020 ; Fabac & Zver, 2011 ; Kişi, 2019 ; Najafinasab et al, 2020 ; Navarro-Martínez et al, 2020 ; Zorlu & Yılmaz, 2020 ) and residential areas sustainability (Esmaeilzadeh et al, 2020 ; Fatourehchi & Zarghami, 2020 ; Kramar et al, 2019 ). Furthermore, environmental, economic and social sustainability studies regarding national and regional characteristics (Alipouri et al, 2020 ; Calabrese et al, 2019 ; Jayaraman et al, 2015 ; Modibbo et al, 2020 ) related to general issues of sustainable development has narrow literature.…”

“…The scholarship associated SWOT and AHP to overcome the problems in decision-making methods in AHP processes with additional applications to AHP approaches and provide choices according to the application areas, as hybrid studies are also developed. Some of these are hybrid SWOT-ANP-FANP (Arsić et al, 2017 ); A'WOT hybrid method (Kişi, 2019 ); SWOT-AHP hybrid approach (Najafinasab et al, 2020 ); SWOT and F-AHP (Kramar et al, 2019 ); AHP-Fuzzy and TOPSIS models (Alipouri et al, 2020 ); SWOT-Fuzzy AHP approach (Wang et al, 2020 ); ANP and Fuzzy-TOPSIS-SWOT (Ervural et al, 2018 ); SWOT-AHP and Fuzzy-TOPSIS (Solangi et al, 2019 ); fuzzy axiomatic design approach (Feng, 2020 ); Fuzzy-AHP-VIKOR(Awasthi et al, 2018 ); Fuzzy-AHP (Calabrese et al, 2019 ); Fuzzy-AHP and SWOT (Tavana et al, 2016 ); SWOT-Fuzzy, TOPSIS with AHP (Bas, 2013 ); AHP-ELECTRE (Borajee & Yakchali, 2011 ); SWOT-Fuzzy COPRAS (Hatefi, 2018 ); Fuzzy-AHP-TOPSIS (Ocampo, 2019 ); Fuzzy-AHP–TOPSIS(Aksu & Küçük, 2020 ); Fuzzy DEMATEL MCDA (Yıldızbaşı et al, 2020 ); and MCDA-AHP-TOPSIS-VIKOR (Kaymaz et al, 2020 ) as hybrid multi-criteria decision-making approach literature keeps developing.…”

From Form-Based to Performance-Based Codes

“…Over the years, this concept became increasingly indispensable for decision-making in many countries around the world [29]. This concept involves practical approaches, models and tools for evaluating urban planning [24] including, for example, sustainable solutions for urban mobility [30], geospatial approach for urban growth [31], carrying capacity assessment [32], alternative energy sources such as solar and wind [33], green buildings and housing [34], mixed-use developments [28] and more.…”

A CLIOS Analysis for the Promotion of Sustainable Plans of Mobility: The Case of Mexico City

“…Hence, the element type as well as the characterization of the individual links for the identified four physical subsystems of our case study, can be appreciated in Figures 5-8. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the following figures are the result of an extensive literature review process where several works have been consulted [4,51,[64][65][66][67], [69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79] and interlinks have been created, where at first were not obvious. Another very important issue that needs to be taken into account within the CLIOS diagram development is the nature of the links that interconnect each element.…”