Commuters’ accessibility to transportation lifelines in Karaj city, Iran: A fuzzy approach

Having a comprehensive knowledge about commuters’ access to transportation lifelines can empower the urban planners, who are responsible for the development of infrastructure and the facilities that support approaching sustainable development. It is also beneficial for commuters to find the optimum place of residence. Access analysis is always involved with complexities that are mostly originated in the challenges of Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) and uncertainty. In this paper, the results of the access analysis concerning different transportation options are combined in a fuzzy inference system in order to identify the most appropriate place of residence for commuters in Karaj city, Iran. In the first step, the access maps based on the available means of public transportation and also the distance to capital Tehran, were generated. Afterward, the rules and configurations of the fuzzy inference system were calibrated through collecting the opinions of commuters’ society and the desirability map was generated combining the access maps. The achieved results were evaluated with Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). It is regarded that the proposed fuzzy model is capable of providing more detailed information about the desirable residential locations as it gathers deep knowledge through fuzzy rules and provides nonlinear modeling of access.