Approximate TOPSIS for vessel selection under uncertain environment

The selection of appropriate vessels to carry out shipping activities is crucial for many maritime stakeholders including charterers, shipowners, brokers, surveyors and safety engineers. The task is essentially a process of multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) under uncertainty requiring analysts to derive rational decisions from ambiguous and incomplete data contained in different quantitative and qualitative forms. Fuzzy Techniques for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) have been well documented in the literature and commonly used in the process of group decision-making under fuzzy environment. While showing the attractiveness in dealing with ambiguous estimates, they have been criticised to be incapable of modelling incompleteness encountered in decision analysis. This paper therefore uses the concept of degrees of belief to develop a novel approximate interval TOPSIS approach for overcoming some of the drawbacks of classical fuzzy TOPSIS methods and facilitating the development of reliable vessel selection models under uncertain environment. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.