A survey and optimization-based evaluation of development strategies for the air cargo industry

This paper presents a survey and optimization-based approach to evaluating alternative strategies proposed for the development of a national's air cargo industry. An empirical study of Taiwan's air cargo industry is conducted to illustrate how the approach integrates experts' opinions from three stakeholder groups (the government, the academic, and the carrier) about the relative importance and achievability of 18 alternative strategies. To help experts weight alternative strategies subjectively, a new hierarchical pairwise comparison process is used, with the ratio scale represented by triangular fuzzy numbers. In judging the achievability level of alternative strategies, linguistic variables represented by triangular fuzzy numbers are used. To ensure the acceptability of the evaluation result, a carrier oriented optimal weighting approach is developed for maximizing the overall preference value of the carriers, subject to the weight ranges specified by the government and academic experts. The overall preference and ranking of the alternative strategies are made by aggregating the optimal weights with their achievability level. The approach has general application in evaluating policy alternatives by taking account of subjective judgments of different stakeholder groups.