VALUE-FOCUSED THINKING FOR INLAND WATERBORNE CARGO PRIORITIZATION

摘要

Inland waterways hold an important position in the transportation system of the United States. Its disruption can have widespread economic and social impacts. These detrimental consequences can be mitigated by intelligently prioritizing the barge cargoes for offloading such that the most essential cargoes can be identified to be moved from the inland waterway promptly. Values are attached to the barge cargoes, which can assist the decision maker in prioritizing between them. This paper presents a value-focused thinking (VFT) approach that employs values (stakeholder's objectives) to determine the prioritized ordering of the barge cargoes. We examine the VFT literature regarding areas of transportation, logistics, and supply chain (TLSC). For our proposed cargo prioritization problem, a qualitative value model, as the initial work of the VFT analysis, is constructed in this paper as the critical step for the future quantitative analysis.