Application of FMCDM model to selecting the hub location in the marine transportation: A case study in southeastern Asia

Hub location selection problems have become one of the most popular and important issues not only in the truck transportation and the air transportation, but also in the marine transportation. The main focus of this paper is on container transshipment hub locations in southeastern Asia. Transshipment is the fastest growing segment of the containerport market, resulting in significant scope to develop new transshipment terminal capacity to cater for future expected traffic flows. A shipping carrier not only calculates transport distances and operation costs, but also evaluates some qualitative conditions for existing hub locations and then selects an optimal container transshipment hub location in the region. In this paper, a fuzzy multiple criteria decision-making (FMCDM) model is proposed for evaluating and selecting the container transshipment hub port. Finally, the utilization of the proposed FMCDM model is demonstrated with a case study of hub locations in southeastern Asia. The results show that the FMCDM model proposed in this paper can be used to explain the evaluation and decision-making procedures of hub location selection well. In addition, the preferences are calculated for existing hub locations and these are then compared with a new proposed container transshipment hub location in the region, in this instance the Port of Shanghai. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis is performed.