Design of a Decision Support System on Selection of Multimodal Transportation with Environmental Consideration between Thailand and Vietnam

Abstract

The objective of this research is to design and develop a decision support system (DSS) to select multimodal transportation route between Thailand and Vietnam under the conditions in term of budget, time, transport risk, and the environmental impact. The developed DSS model uses Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) as a tool to bring consistency weight whose decision criteria (both quantitative and qualitative) are expressed in subjective measures according to the point of view of users. Next, weighting derived from the results of AHP is taken as a weight of objective function in goal programming model. In this research, the Zero-One Goal Programming model is used to generate an optimal multimodal transportation routing based upon the criteria in term of budget, time, transport risk, and importantly, the environmental setting which is important to a number of countries. The case study of this research is a transported service, originating from Bangkok in Thailand to a destination at Da Nang port in Vietnam. There are, for example, the user can set the budget at 5,000 USD for 8-day period of transportation, with route risk scale and the environmental impact scale. The results found that the optimal route is sea transport departed from Bangkok to Da Nang Port, and truck service is deliver goods to customers. Transportation cost is equal to 1,080 USD for 8-day period of transportation, route risk scale is equal to 2, an environmental impact scale is equal to 3 and standard deviation is equal to 15.99. The results show that the DSS can guide to choose the lowest cost route in accordance with overall criteria, and minimise the environmental impact effectively. The results analysis, recommendations and limitations are also presented.