Analyzing Transportation Services for Older Adults in Southeastern Wisconsin

Abstract

Older adults are important users to consider in the evaluation of transportation services. Many older non-drivers take fewer trips than their driving peers. It is important that transportation services meet the needs of older adults to provide greater access to this subset of the population. This thesis applies the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to evaluate the thirty-one non-private transportation services that exist in southeastern Wisconsin. The AHP structure uses multiple criteria to evaluate and rank several alternatives based on a stated goal. An optimization model using the LINGO solver introduces a fuzzy scale level to the AHP and assigns weights to each criterion. The chosen criteria cover cost, reliability, flexibility, availability, and accommodations categories, and they are used to assign scores to and rank the thirty-one transportation services.