Multi–criteria assessment of the combined shipments container transportation possibility

Abstract

The topic of the study is the organization of combined shipments transportation using container technologies, which is a complex multi-purpose decision-making task both technically and economically. The complexity of this task is due to the fact that when choosing an option, making a decision on transportation, many criteria and requirements, which often conflict with each other, have to be taken into account. It is noted that currently almost all mathematical methods for optimizing transport processes are designed to find the extremum of one objective function. Therefore, in the course of solving transport problems, multi-purpose tasks are often reduced to single-purpose ones and, as a rule, lead to a distortion of the problem essence and, as a result, to the substitution of one task for another. At the same time, in modern transport science, there is no established approach as to which transportation indicators should be considered alternative when solving problems with several target functions, since they tend to minimize the set of acceptable options at various points. A method based on making compromise decisions is considered in the paper. It consists in organizing transportation based on a balanced decision, in which, in a certain proportion, all accounting factors for organizing the combined shipments transportation from the marine terminal territory to the interior of the mainland using established and promising technology for applying new means of cargo consolidation, namely, cargo delivery range using container technologies, transportation cost and time. When using this method, it is assumed that not an unambiguous answer, but a whole range of rational proposals for decision-making by the responsible person will be received.