Verbal analysis of large-scale transport projects: instrumental support for evaluation and selection procedures

Abstract

Verbal analysis in this article is understood as an integral part of system analysis. It seems reasonable to use it when making complex decisions in poorly structured problem situations. Typical in this case is the situation that arises when we decide on the construction of a large-scale railway project of strategic importance for the state in the long term. Such projects often make errors in assessing the social effectiveness of their costs and results, and the costs are generally higher than estimated, but the results are lower. For this reason, at the stage of investment, the projects are stopped, in some cases for many years. Such conflicts arise both in Russia and abroad.

The article proposes a systematic approach to the evaluation of large-scale railway projects in the phase of their preinvestment feasibility studies, where the influence of the uncertainty factor and the risks caused by it is maximum. The system assessment structure of projects is a logical-heuristic model, whose information base is based on expert technologies and organizational procedures that form a system of complex investment decision-making. The software products patented in Russia have been developed and tested to support the relevant procedures. Primarily, the novelty of the approach consists, in the ways of transformation of verbal assessments of experts into numerical ones and, secondly, in the rules of accounting radical (non-stochastic) uncertainty while comparing project alternatives.