PennDOT Planning Partners’ Conference 2009 focused on using decision making tools to help transportation planners make key decisions. The document discusses: 1) Decision Lens, a decision support software that helps structure complex decisions and quantify both tangible and intangible criteria through pairwise comparisons. 2) How Decision Lens can be applied to transportation planning decisions by identifying criteria, prioritizing criteria based on importance, evaluating projects against weighted criteria, and allocating resources. 3) A demonstration of how the software models a decision about interstate transportation projects.

1. PennDOT Planning Partners’ Conference 2009:Structure and Quality to Key Decisions for Transportation Planners 20 October 2009 Jonathan Malpass, Sr. Account Manager, Decision Lens

2. Agenda Introduction to decision making and Decision Lens Comparing apples and oranges Applying Decision Lens to transportation Interstate model / Decision Lens demonstration 2

3. What makes decision making difficult? 3

5. A technique for quickly collecting and synthesizing qualitative and quantitative information from multiple data sources and stakeholders for trade-off, prioritization and/or resource allocation decisions

7. Decisions are based on judgments Making judgments is one of the most basic of innate human skills By breaking up problems and then comparing discrete elements, we are able to arrive at a decision Even babies can discern between a smile and a frown. They are applying their innate ability to judge.

8. Let’s compare apples and oranges How do you choose a piece of fruit from a bowl?

9. Identify characteristics of fruit 8 sweetness tartness texture juiciness size

11. The result is a measurable output of something that normally seems intangible – if sweetness is 3 times size, we also know size is 1/3 sweetness:

12. Sweetness: 3

13. Size: 1/3size Here we have decided that sweetness is 3 times more important than size sweetness vs

15. “Cost” or “dollars” are similarly an agreed upon unit of value. They have no meaning outside of this agreed-upon value10 “Intangible” factors must be interpreted according to what they provide toward your goal. The power of pairwise comparisons is that it enables you to trade-off both Tangible and Intangible factors against each other

16. Derive overall “priorities” using pairwise comparisons of the criteria In decision making, we express judgments using a fundamental numerical scale (1 to 9) These represent our interpretation of dominance—one criterion may be twice as important (Moderate – 2) or five times as important (Strong – 5), all the way up to nine times as important (Extreme – 9). A “1” is Equal importance Comparing one factor to another gives its relative importance 11 To select a type of fruit, which is more important? Sweetness Tartness Texture Sweetness Texture Juiciness Juiciness Size Each criterion is compared to the others to assess their relative importancefor our decision

19. Transportation problems have complexity Not just a technical problem, but a “socio-technical” problem with many subtle facets Many and diverse stakeholders Many, often competing, considerations Goals may not be sharply defined Transportation problems are multi-criteria How do we accommodate the growing number of users of our transportation system? Can we continue tomaintain and preserve such a vast transportation network? Costs continue to rise, but our budget continues to shrink. How do we increase our partnerships and integration with other transportation networks for the most efficiency and effectiveness? 15

21. Cluster like criteria to build an overall decision model

22. Finalize model including definitions of each criterion16

27. Not just a 1-5 scalePrioritize projects using final scores based on ratings of each project and the weight of the criteria 20

29. Ratings with the weight of the criteria yields an overall score for each alternative

31. Funding minimums and must funds

32. Funding buckets or pools

33. Resource types

34. Time periods22

36. Various constraints can be included to reflect real-life limitations or requirements