Risk assessment of dry bulk cargo operations using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method

Abstract

Risk assessment is a vital for any industry to characterize the hazards and decision making on its control options. Risk assessment comprise 3 stages of process which are risk identification, risk estimation and risk evaluation. In the case of seaport terminal operation, it is crucial for seaport to determine possible risks. This study review a qualitative decision making method known as Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for assessing the risk of the dry bulk cargo operations within seaport terminal. A brainstorming approach has undertaken to identify the risk attributes to operational process of dry bulk cargo. Using the real live data from the case study, the dry bulk cargo operations risk ranking was measured to be an indicator in decision making on risk control options and evaluation of its effectiveness towards each risk factor identified in this study. It shows that AHP method is good tools to converting qualitative measures which used a set of linguistic terms in describing the relationship between risk factors in the hierarchy into quantitative measures using mathematical calculation through Analytic Hierarchy Process to measure the operational risk of bulk cargo operation within seaport. Therefore, the pairwise comparisons between factors in the hierarchy could applied linguistic terms and the calculation of weightage to measure the operational risk of bulk cargo operation within seaport.