Public Transportation Business Model Assessment with Spherical Fuzzy AHP

Abstract

The business model (BM) provides a strategic tool to achieve goals for the companies. In recent years, it has been used frequently both in business areas and in literature. BM comprises three main blocks that are activity, value, and finance. For non-profit organizations, the criterion of impact is added to the model to express social and environmental issues. In this study, Spherical Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (SF-AHP) is applied to evaluate the public transportation business model taking into account internal and external perspectives with political, economical, social, technological, legal, and environmental analysis (P.E.S.T.L.E), and also impact factor. The proposed model is developed by three levels with criteria and sub-criteria according to the literature and evaluated by national and international transportation experts. Results show that the internal environment is more important with 0.605 weight than the external one in the first stage. For the second stage, activity comes first with 0.232 weight, key partners which is sub-criteria under activity with 0.088 weight, is the most important for the third stage. The originality of the paper is to provide academicians and practitioners a business model framework for public transportation. And also, this study will be a guide for users to find out which criteria is superior to others in BM.