Promoting Sustainable Urban Mobility: an Integrated Fuzzy Decision-Making Model for Assessing Autonomous Bus Alternatives

Abstract

Today, in addition to the increasing pressures on urban transportation authorities to achieve sustainability goals, it has become necessary to comprehensively evaluate innovative transportation technologies such as autonomous (driverless) buses due to the increasing demand for public transportation applications that will contribute to making urban transportation more sustainable with its environmental, social, economic and social dimensions. In addition, the reservations and hesitations of decision-makers about integrating autonomous buses into urban transportation systems have not been eliminated. These hesitations and reservations are mainly due to critical research, theoretical gaps, and limitations in practice. Considering these gaps, this study presents an innovative model that integrates the fuzzy logarithm methodology of additive weights (LMAW) method and the fuzzy Dombi Bonferroni (DOBI) method to evaluate and rank 20 different autonomous bus alternatives with 33 sustainability criteria. The proposed integrated decision-making procedure can effectively manage complex uncertainties while examining whether autonomous bus alternatives can be integrated into urban transportation systems based on sustainability, considering four-dimensional sustainability criteria. This finding indicates that urban transportation's user-oriented and reliable nature is critical to achieving sustainability goals. In addition, the Proterra Catalyst (A9) is the autonomous bus with the highest sustainability performance for use in urban transport, followed by the Mercedes-Benz Future Bus (A18) and Mercedes-Benz eCitaro (A8). These results regarding alternatives underline the importance of advances in autonomous vehicle technology and making these vehicles more sustainable in evaluation processes. © 2025 Elsevier Ltd