Public Project Classification Based on Citizens’ Satisfaction Using Rough Sets Theory-Case Study: Tehran Municipality

Public projects are those projects that are run by public financial resources such tax or other national governmental incomes. Selection of these projects is relatively difficult due their importance, long life-time, and high costs. In most models developed in previous studies to select public projects, financial matters and risks are the only factors which were considered. However, the public projects should naturally be selected in a way that citizens’ benefits are maximized (in both short- and long-term) and citizens’ living level increases. In other words, public projects should be selected to increase citizens’ satisfaction. In this paper, an algorithm is firstly developed using the rough sets theory to determine citizens’ mentality model and citizens’ judgment tree. Then, a method would be presented to determine services scopes of the public organizations to improve citizens’ satisfaction. Such method reviews the citizens’ judgment tree and the present status. Finally, the rough sets theory-based algorithm is presented to predict citizens’ satisfaction from the potential public projects. The predicted citizens’ satisfaction would be used to select the best projects in order to improve citizens’ satisfaction. To test the efficiency of the proposed models, the Tehran municipality as a public organization with lots of missions and duties is studied as the case study.