Incorporating uncertainty and multiple criteria in vessel selection

The selection of appropriate vessels to carry out shipping activities is crucial for many maritime stakeholders, including charterers, shipowners, brokers, surveyors, and safety engineers. The task is essentially a process of multiple criterion decision making under uncertainty, requiring analysts to derive rational decisions from uncertain and incomplete data contained in different quantitative and qualitative forms. The difficulty and complexity of such a task is obvious and thus stimulates the study of developing a novel decision-making technique under uncertainty with multiple criteria. The core of the method is the Dempster—Shafer theory, based on which the new function of fuzzy ‘evidential reasoning’ is investigated, analysed, and further applied to improve the vessel selection process of dealing with multiple criteria with insufficient and ambiguous information. A numerical case study of selecting an oil tanker based on a voyage charter party is presented to demonstrate the proposed method.