Evaluation and application of AHP, MAUT and ELECTRE III for infrastructure management

Infrastructure management renders a number of decision-making problems from assets condition inspections to maintenance planning and resources optimisation. Since management of infrastructure pertains to not only technical requirements but also to societal and economic developments, these decision problems have multiple and often conflicting objectives. Various methods of MCDA based on the decision theory and game theory are proposed to aid-in decision-making problems. Owing to the wide area of applications and extensive variation in MCDA methodology, the selection of appropriate MCDA method pertaining to the specific needs of infrastructure management and decision maker is a difficult task. In this paper, two synthesis-based methods (i.e. AHP and MAUT) and an outranking method (i.e. ELECTRE III) is applied on same maintenance decision making problem to evaluate them for their scalability, ease of use, risk consideration, and few other aspects. The results of evaluation suggest that a) without a computerised tool the scalability of these methods is tedious task b) only MAUT considers the risk attitude of a decision maker c) AHP and MAUT both require the data to be converted to definite scale for analysis, for instance, to Saaty scale of comparison and to utility functions respectively and d) unlike other two, ELECTRE works on preference structure and yields partial pre-orders. These aforementioned results are obtained by application of AHP, MAUT, and ELECTRE III on the maintenance planning decision problem of 22 road bridges from Netherlands road network. Despite the inherent methodology differences of these methods, the result of case study shows minor difference in ranking yielded by considered MCDA methods.