Prioritizing constructing projects of municipalities based on ahp and copras-g: a case study about footbridges in Iran

Each municipality has a certain budget for constructing, maintaining and repairing every year. Prioritizing projects is one of the difficult issues of decision making and takes time for evaluating and programming. The main aim of this study is to make a framework for municipalities to prioritize their projects based on this framework and for this a footbridge project of Sari City in Iran was selected as a case study for this research to show prioritizing of boulevards that have no footbridge for constructing footbridge. The cost of constructing footbridge is sometimes high and the footbridge site place is important for pedestrians. Besides, selecting of an area for constructing new footbridges includes quantitative and qualitative factors, such as the total cost, environmental factors, and socio-economic factors. For these reasons, selecting area for constructing footbridges can be viewed as a kind of Multi-Attribute Decision Making (MADM) problem. The aim of this study is the use of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and COPRAS-G methods for evaluating and selecting an area for constructing new footbridges alternatives. More precisely, AHP was used for calculation of the relative importance of criteria and COPRAS-G method was used for ranking location alternatives.