An integrated multiple criteria preference ranking approach to the Canadian west coast port congestion conflict

Abstract

Abstract:An integrative conflict analysis approach, incorporating an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) based preference ranking method into the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution (GMCR), is employed to investigate the Canadian west coast port congestion dispute. The Canadian west coast has historically been an important gateway connecting North America to Asia thanks to its specific geographical and strategic location. Despite successful operations and maintenance of the port facilities to handle international trade during the past few decades, the west coast is now facing increasing congestion problems, resulting in significant delays in transporting goods from the west coast to other parts of Canada and the USA. The strategic analyses carried out in this research suggest potential resolutions in which Canada would expand port facilities at various locations, encouraging traders to continue choosing the Canadian west coast as one of their trade gateways to North America. and 114%, respectively (Transport Canada, 2005). Some statistical data provide further description of this situation: the world gross domestic product in the past twenty years has increased 2.8% annually; global container trade has increased about 9% annually; more than 140 jumbo containerships of 8,000 to 10,000 TEUs capacity will be sailing on the world's oceans within five years. These capacity crises, due to exponentially Meanwhile, the US ports are also experiencing a serious congestion situation. The huge amounts of international trading are "straining the supporting infrastructure" and significantly delaying all activities within supply chains (Sowinski, 2007 (Saaty, 1980(Saaty, , 1982(Saaty, , 1995(Saaty, , 2001 provides a mathematical procedure to take both quantitative and qualitative criteria into consideration in ranking decision alternatives. In this paper, the AHP approach is adapted to elicit preference rankings for each DM, which are then fed into a decision support system (DSS), GMCR II (Fang et al., 2003a(Fang et al., , 2003b, to carry out a standard graph model stability analysis. KeywordsThe remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In the second section, the basic methodology utilized in the application is described. Section III develops the conflict model for the Canadian west coast congestion problem and explains the preference derivation procedure from the AHP method. Section IV furnishes useful structural insights garnered from the strategic analysis. The paper concludes with some remarks in Section V. DESCRIPTION OF THE METHODOLOGYIn this section, basics are first introduced about the graph model and its associated DSS, GMCR II. Then, the AHP approach is briefly explained with a focus on its structural features and practical procedures for utilizing the approach to derive preference information that will be incorporated into the graph model for carrying out the strategic analysis. The Graph Model for Conflict ResolutionThe Graph Model for Conflict Resolution is a simple but flexible methodology that is designed t...

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