LAUSR

In the shipping industry, the sustainability of the shipping companies has received more attention besides the economic benefits. A suitable evaluation model can provide a credible sustainable improvement test and guide the operation and management of shipping companies. This study is concerned with a granular evaluation model for the sustainable competitiveness evaluation of container liners, where the interval linguistic version of the analytic hierarchy process is designed for comparing alternatives comprehensively. To obtain ideal consistent preference relations, we propose a modification method by constructing information granules and using particle swarm optimization. Moreover, based on the combination of individual preference relations and experts’ weights obtained from the social network, the aggregated overall opinion of alternatives is achieved. Furthermore, a case study evaluating the sustainable competitiveness of container liners is conducted to support the proposed evaluation framework’s feasibility and practicality.