A Systematic Review of the Latest Advancements on Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) Technique Focusing on Applications in Transportation Planning

Abstract

Finding methods to develop transportation planning and accordingly attract more people to use sustainable transportation is one of the most important subjects for transportation planners and decision-makers in current studies. The Structural Equation Model (SEM) is a statistical approach to examining the relationship between observed variables and latent variables. SEM is not only a single process, but also a cluster of related statistical techniques. The potential of SEM techniques lies in the essence of several issues in transportation planning and in using it as a guide for authorities. The main aim of this study is to present a systematic review of the application of the SEM methods in the assessment of transportation planning in the past decades, consequently, encouraging researchers to further investigate.
After conducting a review of 47 articles published in high-quality journals, from 2011–2020, the recorded articles are clustered into three main groups; perception, satisfaction and loyalty, and behavior related to mode choice. Further, these three groups are classified according to numerous key perspectives, containing published year, type of transportation mode, sample size, software and method.
The result of this review article shows that since 2018 the usage of SEM approaches has significantly increased for the evaluation of public transportation service quality. Furthermore, recall findings in this article are recommended for researchers such as the improvement of the application and practice of SEM utilize methods in terms of transportation planning research to avoid imprecisions in a future study, particularly addressing the problems related to public transportation.