Technique selection and evaluation of ballast water management methods under an intuitionistic fuzzy environment: An information axiom approach

Abstract

A recent survey showed the reluctance of ship-owners to install ballast water treatment systems onboard their ships. This raised a question on the acceptability of shipboard management of ballast water and the need to investigate the potential of non-shipboard alternatives to managing the menace of invasive species transfer via ships’ ballast water. The aim of this article is to investigate the viability of both shipboard and onshore-based concepts of ballast water management with respect to the evaluation criteria stipulated in the Ballast Water Management Convention of the International Maritime Organization. To achieve that, an appropriate decision-making technique was selected using a robust procedure; this is critical in the evaluation and ultimate selection of an appropriate ballast water management method. A multi-criteria decision-making technique known as intuitionistic fuzzy multi-attribute axiomatic design which is a hybridized extension of fuzzy axiomatic design was employed for the selection process. The eventual selected technique was used to evaluate the ballast water management options based on the linguistic data collected from an interview with ballast water management experts. The novel applications of intuitionistic fuzzy multi-attribute axiomatic design in this article for technique selection and subsequently for ballast water management methods’ evaluation exemplify not only the versatility of the technique as a decision-making tool but also showed a strong paradigm shift in experts’ opinions about the future of ballast water management beyond just the traditional shipboard system.