Sustainable decision-making using the COMET method: An empirical study of the ammonium nitrate transport management

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of the sustainable ammonium nitrate transport. The significance of this problem is increasing, considered the occurrence of the worldwide agricultural production boost. The existing international regulations for the transport of the dangerous chemical substances are not sufficient to obtain a satisfactory solution for the sustainable transport. The main reason for that is the fact that the safety criteria can easily become dominated by the economic factors. In this paper, the authors use the COMET method to identify a decision making model for the selection of the best scenario of sustainable transport. The COMET method is a new multi-criteria decision-making technique that is free of the rank reversal phenomenon. The identified model provides information about the global and local significance level of each of the criteria. The proposed approach can be easily expanded by using a greater number of criteria, depending on the particular problem analyzed. The proposed methodology is an efficient and highly accurate solution to make decisions based on experts' knowledge.