A multi-criteria decision making model to locate the hub ports (case study: the maritime industry of Iran)

Hub location problem is one of the most popular issues in communications and, truck transportation, air transportation, and in particular, in marine transport in recent years. The main focus of this article is on selecting and ranking the ports that suitable to be concidered as a hub for container ports. A shipping carrier not only calculates transport distances and operation costs, but also evaluates some qualitative conditions for existing hub locations and then selects an optimal container transshipment hub location in the region. Many qualitative and quantitative criteria involved in the selection of the most appropriate port as a hub. In this paper, two Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) models are applied to evaluate and select hub port in the shipping industry. Finally, performance of each presented MCDM technique have been studied in ports of south of Iran including: Abbas port, Imam, Bushehr, Khorramshahr, Chabahar and Assaluyeh and results of techniques are evaluated.