Study On Evaluation Of Transport Routes Between China And Myanmar By Fuzzy AHP-TOPSIS Approaches

With the fast development of the process in economic globalization and regionalization,the industry in all fields are seeking the global comparative benefits from the advantage of supply chains and logistics.China is not only the biggest manufacturing industry in the world but also it expands the investments to other developing countries.According to the context of belt and road initiative,Myanmar plays a strategically important role for China as it is the junction to link the Indian Ocean to China's southwest landlocked provinces.In addition,because of the establishment of development of China-ASEAN Free Trade Area in 2010,the trade relation between two countries has been developing.In accordance with the strong demand of trade and significant role of containerization in transportation of cargo,the efficient intermodal route is becoming necessary for transporting cargos of Sino-Myanmar trade.In order to satisfy this problem,firstly,an evaluation criteria system is constructed based on literature review and expert's opinions in logistics industry.As a result,cost,time,reliability,capacity,security,Intermodal mode connectivity efficiency,geopolitics and environment are considered as main factors that influence the efficiency of the intermodal routes.Secondly,this study is focus on analyzing of seven transport routes for a 40ft container transportation by examining all alternatives for an empirical case study from Chongqing(China)to Yangon(Myanmar).The next step is calculating the weight of criteria and ranking the transport routes for different preferences.Fuzzy AHP is applied to calculate the weights of criteria and TOPSIS is applied for the evaluation problem and the results of it show the preference order of the intermodal routes.Fuzzy AHP and TOPSIS methods with the integration of qualitative and quantitative data are employed to obtain the goal from the Logistics service provider and shipper's perspectives.The results shown that among the eight main factors,cost factor is prioritized as considering the transport routes.The route using road-sea transport modes through Shanghai is the most preferable one among the alternatives to conduct the shipment from Chongqing to Yangon.Moreover,to examine the possibility of rank reverse,in the last part of the thesis,a sensitivity analysis was implemented by changing the importance weights of factors.To be concluded,this paper would offer some crucial implications for academic and practical aspects.