Assessment of motorways of the sea through a method based on analysis of decision groups

Abstract

Despite the European Union have favoured maritime traffic for years, through exceptions in the application of competition rules, in recent years these exceptions have disappeared progressively. Therefore, shipping companies have to adapt their service to the real needs of the shippers, identifying the controllable charac-teristics in their operational framework in order to act on them. Hence, this paper focuses on the introduc-tion of a new hybrid model in multimodal transport, which allows the opportunity assessment for a shipping company, but through the decision criteria of the service user: the shipper. The results allow the identifica-tion of the main controllable and uncontrollable variables, constraints and objective functions for the ship-ping company, which condition the success of the multimodal chains from the shipper’s perspective. This work develops a particular case to show this hybrid model: shipping companies considering, as a business strategy, to establish a motorway of the sea in Spain.