Developing the Fuzzy Decision Support System in Road Safety Management

The study aims at developing a system (DSS) to help policy makers find out the most efficient road safety measures throughout the provinces in Iran. The system serves the purpose to support future road safety decisions based on information on the efficiency of different types of measures taken previously. More specifically، this efficiency، expressed as an index، is calculated based on historical information from previously implemented measures across different regions in Iran. The identified indicators are all linked to road safety measures contributing to the achievement of sustainable road safety. Considering the number of fatalities as the road safety outcome، an efficiency analysis can be carried out for each region to evaluate the efficiency of the measures taken in the past. To do so، inefficiency measure is calculated، defined by the proportion of fatality rates in relation to the combined measure of road safety performance indicators which should be minimized. The relative inefficiency for each region is modeled by the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique. The inefficiency rate for each DMU must be minimized by either decreased fatality indices and/or increased safety measures to an optimal extent. Using a dual model of the main DEA model for each DMU، a target setting task can be conducted by identifying the benchmarks as the best-performing entities. In a next step، a fuzzy decision making system is constructed to convert the information obtained from the DEA analysis into a rule-based system that can be used by policy makers to evaluate the expected outcomes of certain alternative investment strategies in road safety.