An integrated decision support aid for the strategic transportation master plan of Turkey

This paper proposes and uses a decision support aid in order to guide the transportation planners and policy makers. The development phase of the model consists of the following steps: 1) specification of the relevant variables influencing transportation demand for different modes of transportation (both passenger and freight), 2) Initial development of the causal map of the transportation system through the investigation of past data (both econometric techniques and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) are used at this stage) 3) Giving the final structure to the causal map through the subjective judgments of the transportation experts 4) Calculation of the conditional probabilities using Bayesian Causal Maps, 5) Development and Analysis of scenarios. Developed as such, the proposed integrated decision support model is used to analyze the interrelation between the socio-economic and transportation variables and facilitates the projection for the future freight and passenger traffic of Turkey. This model constitutes, in fact, a section in the report of "Strategy Development for the Transportation Master Plan of Turkey", which was prepared for the Turkish Ministry of Transportation.