Port choice by intra-regional container service operators : an application of decision-making techniques to liner services between Malaysian and other Asian ports

Intra-regional container service operators are challenged to design regular and reliable liner services connecting regional ports at the lowest cost and shortest transit time while considering customer demand. This paper focuses on the selection of ports of call in regular intra-regional container services, an under-researched part of the container shipping market. A combination of decision-making techniques (i.e. Analytical Hierarchy Process, fuzzy link-based and Evidential Reasoning) are presented to assist intra-regional container service operators in selecting ports of call. The proposed methodology is empirically applied to container services between Malaysian and other nearby Asian ports. While Port Klang is the main gateway to Malaysia, the results show that other Malaysian ports should play a more prominent role in accommodating intra-Asian container services. This research can assist maritime stakeholders in evaluating intra-regional port-to-port liner service configurations. Furthermore, the novel mix of decision-making techniques complements and enriches existing academic literature on port choice and liner service configuration

Evaluation of Corporate Sustainability

As a consequence of an increasing demand in sustainable development for business organizations, the evaluation of corporate sustainability has become a topic intensively focused by academic researchers and business practitioners. Several techniques in the context of multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) have been suggested to facilitate the evaluation and the analysis of sustainability performance. However, due to the complexity of evaluation, such as a compilation of quantitative and qualitative measures, interrelationships among various sustainability criteria, the assessor’s hesitation in scoring, or incomplete information, simple techniques may not be able to generate reliable results which can reflect the overall sustainability performance of a company. This paper proposes a series of mathematical formulations based upon the evidential reasoning (ER) approach which can be used to aggregate results from qualitative judgments with quantitative measurements under various types of complex and uncertain situations. The evaluation of corporate sustainability through the ER model is demonstrated using actual data generated from three sugar manufacturing companies in Thailand. The proposed model facilitates managers in analysing the performance and identifying improvement plans and goals. It also simplifies decision making related to sustainable development initiatives. The model can be generalized to a wider area of performance assessment, as well as to any cases of multiple criteria analysis

Generalized Evidence Theory

Conflict management is still an open issue in the application of Dempster Shafer evidence theory. A lot of works have been presented to address this issue. In this paper, a new theory, called as generalized evidence theory (GET), is proposed. Compared with existing methods, GET assumes that the general situation is in open world due to the uncertainty and incomplete knowledge. The conflicting evidence is handled under the framework of GET. It is shown that the new theory can explain and deal with the conflicting evidence in a more reasonable way.Comment: 39 pages, 5 figure