Maritime supply chain sustainability has not been widely studied to date. This paper investigates the sustainability performance of five major UK ports. The UK port system is one of the largest and busiest port systems both in Europe and worldwide. The scope of sustainability narrows down to economical and environmental dimensions. A questionnaire is developed to collect data from port managers and logistics experts. The AHP method is utilized to rank the ports using the collected data. Sensitivity analysis is conducted on the obtained data to verify the consistency among data and outcomes.
Existing research on construction time-cost tradeoff issues rarely explore the origin of the crashing cost. Crashing cost function was either assumed without much justification, or came from historical data of some real projects. As a result the conclusions of the papers can hardly be used to guide allocations of labor and equipment resources respectively. The authors believe Cobb-Douglas function provides a much-needed piece to modeling the cost functions in the construction time-cost tradeoff problem during the crashing process. We believe this new perspective fills a gap of existing time-cost tradeoff research by considering project duration, labor and equipment cost as parameters of the Cobb- Douglas production function. A case study was presented to show how the proposed framework works. Our conclusion is that introducing Cobb-Douglas function into time-cost tradeoff problem provides us extra capacity to further identify the optimal allocations of labor and equipment resources during crashing.
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