An Integrated Approach for Modeling Sustainability Risks in Freight Transportation Systems

Abstract

Integrating sustainability into freight transportation systems (FTSs) is a complex and challenging task due to the sheer number of inherent sustainability risks. Sustainability risks disrupt the economic, social and environmental objectives of freight operations and act as impediments in the development of sustainable freight transportation systems. The area of sustainability risk management is still unexplored and immature in the operational research domain. This study addresses these research gaps and contributes in a threefold manner. First, a total of 36 potential sustainability risks related to FTSs are identified and uniquely classified into seven categories using a rigourous approach. Second, the research proposes two prominent perspectives, namely, ontological and epistemological perspectives to understand risks and develops a novel framework for managing sustainability risks in FTSs. Third, a novel approach by integrating fuzzy evidential reasoning algorithm (FERA) with expected utility theory is developed to quantitatively model and profile sustainability risk for different risk preferences, namely, risk-averse, risk-neutral, and risk-taking scenarios. The proposed FERA is a flexible and robust approach, which transforms the experts' inputs into belief structures and aggregates them using the evidence combination rule proposed in Dempster-Shafer theory to overcome the problem of imprecise results caused by average scoring in existing models. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed model. Unlike conventional perception, our study suggests that most of the high priority sustainability risks are behaviorally and socially induced rather than financially driven. The results provide significant managerial implications including a focus on skills development, and on social and behavioral dimensions while managing risks in FTSs.

Evaluating the risk exposure of sustainable freight transportation: a two-phase solution approach

“…Despite a growing body of literature in the domain of sustainable freight transportation, studies related to the concept of sustainability risks in the context of FTSs have remained scarce. This research gap has also been acknowledged by several authors including Choudhary et al, (2020), Fahimnia et al (2015), Kumar et al, (2019) and Reefke and Sundaram (2017). Qaiser et al (2017)highlighted that most of the research in the area of sustainable freight transportation had until then focused on the USA and Europe.…”

Smart city for sustainable urban freight logistics

“…Karaman, Kilic, and Uyar (2020) consider communication of sustainable supply chain practices such as materials usage, energy efficiency, recycling and waste management metrics to customers and other stakeholders to develop environmentally friendly supply chains and to improve the competitive posture of companies. Choudhary, Shankar, and Choudhary (2020) identify 36 potential sustainability risks associated with freight transportation systems and classify them into seven categories and develop a framework to manage these risks with different risk preferences. They also observe that most high priority sustainability risks in freight transportation systems are not financially driven but are behaviourally and socially induced.…”

Severity analysis and risk profiling of port logistics barriers in the Industry 4.0 era

“…Lastly, perception-based risk profiling is carried out to categorize the risks. The developed model can capture experts’ opinions by using rule-based knowledge, and acquired knowledge is presented using FERA (Choudhary et al. , 2020; Fulzele et al.…”

“…Lastly, perception-based risk profiling is carried out to categorize the risks. The developed model can capture experts' opinions by using rule-based knowledge, and acquired knowledge is presented using FERA (Choudhary et al, 2020;Fulzele et al, 2021;Mohanty and Shankar, 2019). Complexities in decision-making are a result of both qualitative and quantitative attributes.…”