A hybrid approach to Cost-Benefit Analysis in transport infrastructure projects

The major contribution of this paper is to propose a hybrid approach to improve the comprehensiveness of Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) for transport infrastructure projects. CBA is often employed to inform decision makers about the desirability of transport infrastructure investment options. One of the main limitations of traditional CBA approaches is that they do not provide a dynamic view which explicitly illustrates the cost and benefit relationships between component entities over time. This paper addresses this issue by describing a hybrid approach that is a combination between Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) and System Dynamics (SD) that incorporates the Multi-Criteria Method (MCM) to perform transport infrastructure CBA. We discuss how by integrating Agent-Based Modeling into a CBA model, it enables us to model stakeholders' behavior and to investigate complex relationships that result. Next, we describe how the outputs of the BM are used as inputs to the SD model to establish relationship between system components and to measure the impacts of project investment options on the local community. Execution of models also enables sensitivity analysis of infrastructure investment options and visualization of the cost-benefit behavior of each variant over time. The approach is demonstrated using a typical example of a transport infrastructure project.