Developing a policy management algorithm for ship provision: a Delphi Technique Integrated with Hesitant Fuzzy Set (DTIHFS) approach

Currently, elements of ship procurement such as stores, lubricants, manning and various regulatory obligations represent a considerable amount of daily running costs. Specifically, ship provision decision-making consists of many uncertainties and a wide number of decision parameters due to the regional price and product quality differences. The primary objective of this study is to establish a decision support system for provision decision-making process. In order to achieve this, a policy management algorithm framework integrating the Delphi Technique (DT) and the Hesitant Fuzzy Set (HFS) approach was established. In the Delphi process, a survey was distributed to a group of experts from regional shipping companies. The overall consensus revealed that ship location, company policy, and inventory of products could be determined as the main decision-criteria consisting of various attributes which are expressed with linguistic terms. In order to transform linguistics terms to numerical values, the HFS was applied. This integrated methodological framework was also applied to selected case studies of two ships. It was found that it would be possible to reduce daily provision cost per crew from $10.36 to $8.24 and from $16.16 to $11.64, and to save, respectively, $19717.45 and $7404.45 within 453 and 470 days for given ships.