Measuring Road Transport Sustainability Using MCDM-Based Entropy Objective Weighting Method

• Published in: Symmetry
• Main Authors: Chia-Nan Wang, Tran Quynh Le, Kuei-Hu Chang, Thanh-Tuan Dang
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2022
• Subjects: road transport; sustainability; OECD countries; conflicting criteria; objective weighting; entropy; Mathematics; QA1-939; Iceland
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/sym14051033; https://doaj.org/article/2ebb3b516afd44a88fff3746b0c18e18

Road haulage solutions are incredibly adaptable, having the capacity to link domestically and internationally. Road transportation offers a greener, more efficient, and safer future through sophisticated technology. Symmetry and asymmetry exist widely in industrial applications, and logistics and supply chains are no exception. The multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) model is considered as a complexity tool to balance the symmetry between goals and conflicting criteria. This study can assist stakeholders in understanding the current state of transportation networks and planning future sustainability measures through the MCDM approach. The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate and compare the sustainable development of existing road transportation systems to determine whether any of them can be effectively developed in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The integrated entropy–CoCoSo approach for evaluating the sustainability of road transportation systems is introduced, and the framework process is proposed. The entropy method defines the weight of the decision criteria based on the real data. The advantage of the entropy method is that it reduces the subjective impact of decision-makers and increases objectivity. The CoCoSo method is applied for ranking the road transportation sustainability performance of OECD countries. Our findings revealed the top three countries’ sustainability performance: Japan, Germany, and France. These are countries with developed infrastructure and transportation services. Iceland, the United States, and Latvia were in the last rank among countries. This approach helps governments, decision-makers, or policyholders review current operation, benchmark the performance of other countries and devise new strategies for road transportation development to achieves better results.