Strategic and Multidisciplinary Analysis of Increasing Airport Capacity in the Lisbon Region

The selection for the location of complex infrastructures, such as airports, constitutes a challenging decision-making process due to its potential socioeconomic impacts alongside other complex factors that impact the decision process. Within this scope, this article proposes a Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) framework to analyze and evaluate potential airport locations to select the most suitable one amongst a pool of alternatives. The criteria weights are assigned using an objective weighting technique, MEREC. Therefore, the alternative’s final ranks are determined using TOPSIS and WSM methods. To perform the prof-of-concept of our framework, the use case for the increased airport capacity in Lisbon’s region is taken as a basis. Nonetheless, the framework should be easily replicated in other infrastructure location decision use cases.