Public transportation business model evaluation with Spherical and Intuitionistic Fuzzy AHP and sensitivity analysis

Business models represent a critical tool for strategic management. It provides managers with a holistic perspective to shape business operations regarding the activity, value, and finance dimensions. This study presents a business model canvas framework for public transportation organizations including an impact element and its external environment. The main and sub-criteria of the model are designed according to the literature under three hierarchical levels. Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (f-AHP) is applied to the model with two extensions which are Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets (IFS) and Spherical Fuzzy Sets (SFS) to evaluate the proposed model. A solution set is also provided with a traditional AHP in order to check the robustness of the former methods. According to the results, the internal environment is ranked as the most important criteria at the first level for all methods. Whereas the activity element is ranked first at the second level, key partners are ranked first at the third level for all methods. The results show that IF-AHP and SF-AHP provide similar global weights but both of them provided divergent results from traditional AHP weights. Sensitivity analyses show that the model is sensitive to expert judgments. This study contributes to the works of both academicians and practitioners in terms of designing and evaluating public transportation business models.