A novel approach for ports’ container terminals’ risk management based on formal safety assessment: FAHP-entropy measure—VIKOR model

Maritime transport, which requires complex, large, and long port systems, is a major system in the world trade, and since such systems face different risks, various methods have been proposed to evaluate port area/operations-related risks and safety. A review of various methods that quantify risks in port areas shows that a specific risk management approach/framework capable of dealing with all threats/hazards is scarce. The present paper that proposes a PRM model and aims at transferring the safety-oriented FSA to a framework-based approach, utilizes an fuzzy analytical hierarchy process–VIKOR combined model in the port container terminal domain. Aiming at modeling all the probable risks, the PRM methodology was proposed by considering different port factors and their mutual impacts. The risk management method proposed in this paper uses the Z-number total utility idea to cope with the intrinsic uncertainty existing in experts’ judgment in port container terminal domains. To adjust the experts-proposed subjective weights by objective weights and to give ranking and prioritization to failure modes on the basis of maximum “group utility” and minimum “individual regret,” the Shannon entropy concept and the fuzzy VIKOR technique have been made used, respectively. To find some risk management evidence at the Iranian port container terminals, results of a related empirical study, validated through a sensitivity analysis, have been compared with the conventional FSA. It has been revealed that the applicability of the conventional FSA method can be improved by applying the proposed subjective–objective ranking method in fuzzy environments.