Institute of Transportation, MOTC

       Container drayage plays an important role in container shipping, and it functions as an indispensable service for intermodal transportation with containers. With the growth of container transportation, for maintaining competitiveness, container carriers need to meet the increasing demand of inland container transportation. Meanwhile, in the face of the rising pressure of sustainability awareness, in addition to effectively reducing operating costs, container carriers also need to take corporate social responsibility into consideration. For container carriers, how to effectively select suitable suppliers of container drayage (container trailer companies herein) and allocate the consignments to suppliers have become essential management activities. Therefore, in this paper, the first stage is to investigate the importance weights of selection criteria, and selects container drayage service suppliers accordingly.
       By using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) in the first stage, this paper constructs a hierarchy for selecting container drayage service suppliers. Next, the second stage builds a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) model suitable for this study to investigate the alternatives of consignment allocation for selected suppliers. Taking the possible costs and benefits into consideration, the consignment allocation alternatives are evaluated with the economic, environmental and social perspectives for enhancing the case company's competitive advantage. Through the analysis of a case, the results of this study indicate that: (1) for the selection of container drayage service suppliers, the highest ranking criterion is “service performance”, and the criterion of “sustainability management” ranked third; (2) the highest ranking subcriterion is “reciprocal dispatching ability”; (3) AHP can effectively select container drayage service suppliers, and CBA can effectively evaluate consignment allocation alternatives.