A Novel Parsimonious Best Worst Method for Evaluating Travel Mode Choice

There is an obvious trade-off between the amount of the gained information from user surveys and low cost and time efforts of the survey. In this study, we propose a Parsimonious Best Worst Method (P-BWM) to unburden the evaluators from the large number of the pairwise comparisons originated by numerous factors and alternatives required by the Best Worst Method (BWM) in the complex decision problems. The new Parsimonious BWM model assigns priorities to many elements by contrasting pair wisely some reference elements, also it combines the simplicity of direct evaluations with the consistency and reliability of BWM approach. The composed Parsimonious BWM technique has been experimented and validated in a real world problem of Mersin city in Turkey, to evaluate travel mode alternatives. Moreover, a comparative analysis has been applied to the correlation of the adopted outcomes between BWM and P-BWM.