Automation Challenges of Socio-technical Systems

7 Fuzzy Decision Support Model for the Control and Regulation of Transport Systems

7.1. Introduction

The complex nature of decisive situations often implies the existence of a formalization process which can compromise decision-making criteria. In fact, when managing a transport network, as for managing any process, decision-makers come upon major difficulties in making decisions due to the conflicts between the criteria that they need to take into account and to modeling. As a result, it is necessary for the decision-makers to benefit from a modeling approach which acknowledges these criteria as well as a strategy which can reflect their compromise.

Several decision-making problems in the field of urban transport pose great difficulty. In the majority of cases, it is not possible to fully meet all the objectives by simply outlining a set of decisions. The challenge lies in the fact of modeling and identifying uncertain knowledge, as well as the parameters and the criteria which are critical for decision-making. For a public transport customer, the arriving at a destination often requires changing vehicles several times at different transport hubs. These connections are sometimes made in non-optimal conditions due to unforeseen incidents causing buses to be delayed or ahead of time. These uncertain and incomplete data can lead to considerable difficulties for regulating traffic.

The development of a decision is a task of great importance in an uncertain environment such as ...