Modeling A Multi-criteria Decision Making Tool For Strategic Network

The Government of South Sudan is developing a transportation infrastructural Action Plan with the aims of improving the local and regional connectivity by establishing a road network that links cities and national capitals and a rail network to international land borders.Given that South Sudan is landlocked,this connectivity will be of strategic importance and will improve access to local,regional and international markets and boost regional trade.In order to contribute to the realization of this state development agenda,this paper is intended to develop a multi-criteria decision tool for the national networks with a strategic level of planning,which considers both road and rail transport modes to simulate the national infrastructural development plan.Hypothetical traffic flow data is used to load the network using stochastic assignment technique implemented by logit model and the prioritization model is finally used to rank the projects in the order of least minimized transportation,carbon dioxide emission(measure of environmental impact)and investment costs for each candidate route connecting the O-D pairs;the aforementioned criteria forms the basis of decision making regarding which of the alternative routes between the O-D pairs is feasible and be considered in the proposed national network and among the feasible routes in the network which one is given a priority for construction.The considered hypothetical network has four corridors;two as supply(origin)and other two as demand(destination)points.There are total of 14 candidate routes in the whole network,12 of which are road links and 2 are rail links.After the computation,5 routes got discarded from the network and the optimized network is therefore left with 9 routes.