Research on Evaluation Method of Freight Transportation Environmental Sustainability

• Main Authors: Da Huang, Mei Han
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-03-01
• Series: Sustainability
• Subjects: TOPSIS; entropy weight method; freight transportation; sustainability; environment
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/5/2913

As an important part of daily economic activities, freight transportation produces various pollutions during the transportation process, which will have a negative effect on the sustainable development of the environment. In this paper, the entropy weight technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) combination method was used for specific calculations, in order to judge whether transportation is environmentally sustainable. On the basis of selecting and classifying several the important factors of freight transportation, the entropy weight method was used to calculate and analyze the data of inland river transportation over 8 recent years. The weight of each influencing factor was determined, then the TOPSIS method was used to compare the environmental data of 8 years, and the environmental sustainability of the target river transport section was calculated by comparing the results. The method proposed in this paper is the first example of using the entropy weight–TOPSIS combination method to evaluate environmental sustainability in the field of freight transportation, also solving the problems of the impact of subjective factors in existing methods and the difficulty of dealing with multiple factors.