Risk Assessment of Liner Shipping from a Business Environment Perspective

The liner shipping industry (LSI) is a complex and dynamic industry. With the era of unprecedented global changes, the LSI faces a variety of internal, as well as external, risks. Furthermore, the values of the liner shipping operators' performances and operational reliability are not fixed and change within different environments. As a result, an appropriate dynamic model for evaluation of environmental-based risks (EBRs), which is capable of dealing with the external risks, is needed. In this study, for assessment of the values of EBRs, a generic model is constructed and a combination of different decision-making techniques - such as analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy set theory (FST) - are used. Furthermore, evidential reasoning (ER) is used to synthesize the belief values or degrees of linguistic variables of EBRs' criteria. Through the proposed methodology, a decision support framework is developed for the liner shipping operators, which enables them to assess the risk value of a country or a port of call prior to investment or strategic planning. In addition, with the help of the proposed methodology, the liner shipping operators will be able to assess the overall level of existing EBRs in order to proactively facilitate continuous improvement strategies.

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