PortEconomics associate member Adolf Ng, along with Gi-Tae Yeo, Paul T.W. Lee and Z.L. Yang, presented their latest research on modelling port choice in an uncertain environment, during the annual conference of the International Association of Maritime Economists – IAME 2012, that was held in Taipei, Taiwan.
Port choice is an important issue to be investigated to ensure the effective integration of container supply chains and the sustainable development of regional economy. The selection of appropriate ports to facilitate shipping activities and international trade is crucial for many stakeholders, including shipping lines, port administrators, cargo shippers and national governments. The task is essentially a process of multiple criterion decision making (MCDM) under uncertainty, requiring analysts to derive rational decisions from uncertain and incomplete data related to different quantitative and qualitative determinants.
This study proposes a new conceptual port choice method by explaining the role fuzzy logic in evidential reasoning in a complementary way, in which various forms of raw data (either objective or subjective) collected to evaluate port performance can first be converted into and presented as fuzzy grades defined using linguistics terms with degrees of belief (DoBs) and second be combined using evidential reasoning to produce a port choice preference score. The method is applied to analyze the selection of major Northeast Asian (NEA) container ports from a shipping line’s perspective.
The outcome, a port choice preference score, is calculated through using evidential reasoning to directly synthesize the true estimation of the port with respect to each criterion and therefore, unlike a relative ranking index, keeps the “goodness” of port evaluation, capable of benchmarking a specific port’s performance and monitoring the increase of its competitiveness in a longitude study with respect to an individual criterion or all the criteria as a whole.
You might read – and freely download – the full study @PortEconomics.
The annual conference of the International Association of Marime Economists – IAME 2012, held in Taipei, Taiwan, provided the PortEconomics team the opportunity to present 16 different port or port related studies that progressed over the course of the most resent months – read more & reach the studies: PortEconomics team@IAME2012.
