Research On A Multi-Attribute Decision-Making Model For The Freight Consumer's Mode Choice Behavior

For a long time, the lagging development of transportation has seriously restricted the persistent and fast development of Chinese economy. There are many reasons for the lagging development. Personally, the author thinks that one of the most important reasons is the absence of correct theoretical support.Nowadays, word-wide transportation industries are entering a new era characterized by'supply chain competition'. In this new situation, the spontaneous research on transportation theory is urgently needed to instruct and promote the development of transportation industry in China.The author has been working in Chinese railway container transportation industry for a long time and feels that the government officials and carriers in China have paid enough attentions to optimize transportation process. However, there are few people self-consciously trying to attach importance to the freight consumers (shippers and consignees), studying the freight consumer's decision-making process from the perspective of Marketing for services, Microeconomics and Decision-making Theory.This dissertation focuses on the freight consumer (shipper and consignee) for the first time and studies the freight consumer's mode choice decision-making behavior intensively and systematically from the above perspectives.The research can be divided into three parts or levels, which are listed as follows:1. Answer the question - what are the freight consumer purchases?Freight transportation is inseparable from modern logistics. This dissertation reviews the traditional theory and recent researches on demand and supply of freight transportation, and then proposes the author's point of view. The author suggests that freight transportation creates time and place utility for the commodity synchronously, and then it adds value to commodity. Transportation is not the burden for commodity exchange, on the contrary, it is the part of commodity production and it is a value-added process. The added value for the commodity is the time and place utility. What the freight consumer purchases is just the time and place utility added to commodity, which is produced in transportation.2. Analyze the freight consumer how to evaluate the alternatives in the decision-making process.Freight transportation can be regarded as the consumption of transportation service (the product supplied by carriers) by freight consumer (shippers or consignees). The dissertation investigates the general pattern of behavior analysis and the theory and method of consumer (choice) behavior from the perspective o Marketing for services, Microeconomics and Decision-making theory.Based on analyzing the utility and characteristic of freight service, the dissertation proposes a Multi-attribute Decision-making Model by using reliability, transit time, price, safety and convenience as the major service attributes. The characteristics of mode choice in freight transportation and the decision-making model are analyzed. According to the part-compensated property, the dissertation uses an improved method named ELECTRE to solve the model, and analyzes the sensitivity of weight and value of each attributes. An numerical example from Beijing to Shanghai is presented. The decision-making model is solved and the sensitive analysis is given.The multi-attribute decision-making model for freight mode choice design ed in this dissertation pushes the research on freight mode choice forward to phase of quantitative study. It can help shipper and consignee to choice transportation mode or carriers more rationally, and help carriers to understand the consumer's behavior deeply, and improve their services pertinently.3. Focusing on the choice rule of maximizing the utility, the dissertation extends the role of a freight consumer to a trader, and then proposes profit-maximization inventory model taking consideration the sale price and value depreciation of commodity by time.This model is more practical, and can help us to understand the behavior of freight consumes more practically and extensively. An numerical example is also presented in the dissertation.The three parts above are related and constitute the main content of the dissertation.Finally, taking Chinese railway container transportation industry as the example, the dissertation analyses the freight mode choice behavior by using multi-attribute decision-making model mentioned above and gives some suggestions for the development of Chinese railway container transportation.The mode choice of freight transport is one of the most important problem in the research area of multi-modal transportation and modern logistics. The study uses qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis and empirical study methods. As a whole, the model and proposal in this dissertation are useful to promote the development of transportation industry.