morteza rahmanee nikooei - department of management, yazd science and research branch, islamic azad university, yazd, iran
hamed shakerian - phd student, department of industrial management, tabriz branch, islamic azad university, tabriz, iran

today, along with enhancement of social well-being and economic development, demand for transportation is growing increasingly. many countries are seeking for providing transportation services at a reasonable price. therefore, optimization of carrying goods on national or international roads is highly important in terms of costs and transportation indicator, so that the goods are shipped at minimum costs and maximum profit for the forwarding agencies. for this purpose, the limitations should be identified. in this paper, considering critical indicators and various modes of transportation, we attempt to choose and rank the best option with respect to pre defined criteria imposing least costs. the indicators and criteria determined in this research for selecting the best mode of container loading are those introduced by transport experts (sima marine shipping company) based on the their importance for the company. these indicators include forwarding charges, volume of containers and quantity of portable containers (20ft and 40ft), which are not equally important and each has been given a weight by company s experts, the total of which equals one. to use the weights in a logical manner, shannon entropy technique was applied. our aim in this research is selection of the best option for carrying the containers under conditions which the demand for the goods to be shipped overweighs the capacity of the ship, known as critical point in loading the containers. to achieve this aim, for ranking containerized shipping a multi-criteria decision analysis method called topsis is used to rank m options against n criteria.

shannon entropy; topsis; critical point; transportation pattern; multi-criteria decision analysis