An Integrated Approach for Modeling Sustainability Risks in Freight Transportation Systems

This study addresses these research gaps and contributes in a threefold manner. First, a total of 36 potential sustainability risks related to FTSs are identified and uniquely classified into seven categories using a rigourous approach. Second, the research proposes two prominent perspectives, namely, ontological and epistemological perspectives to understand risks and develops a novel framework for managing sustainability risks in FTSs. Third, a novel approach by integrating fuzzy evidential reasoning algorithm (FERA) with expected utility theory is developed to quantitatively model and profile sustainability risk for different risk preferences, namely, risk ‐averse, risk‐neutral, and risk‐taking scenarios. The proposed FERA is a flexible and robust approach, which transforms the experts’ inputs into belief structures and aggregates them using the evidence combination rule proposed in Dempster–Shafer theory to overcome the problem of imprecise results caused by average scoring in existing models. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed model. Unlike conventional perception, our study suggests that most of the high priority sustainability risks are behaviorally and socially induced rather than fin ancially driven. The results provide significant managerial implications including a focus on skills development, and on social and behavioral dimensions while managing risks in FTSs.
Source: Risk Analysis - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Tags: Original Research Article Source Type: research