In recent years, multimodal transportation has achieved rapid development with the
support of the governments and stakeholders. Multimodal transportation is characterized
by high transportation efficiency, low transportation cost, energy saving and environmental
protection. However, the existing transportation industry development indicators are
defined and counted from the perspective of a single subsystem. This contribution
establishes a performance evaluation index for three container multimodal transportation
subsystem from four aspects: capacity, transportation cost, service quality and sustainable
development based on system engineering techniques. In order to fully reflect the
differences between the decision-makers' subjective experience and preference and
objective information, this contribution uses the combination of Analytic Hierarchy
Process (AHP) and entropy method to determine the weight of indexes. The methodology
is applied to examine performance of three container multimodal transportation subsystems
in Ningbo-Shaoxing (China) multimodal transportation system. The results show that:
multimodal railway is superior to highways and multimodal inland waterway. The
methodology and discussion of the AHP-entropy method may be useful for similar
transport systems in a make decision framework.
