A Classification Method for Inland Navigable and Substandard Waterways

Abstract

Classification of inland navigable and substandard waterways is essential for optimal allocation of safety administration resources. It is stipulated in “Regulations on the Administration of Water Traffic Safety in Zhejiang Province” that Maritime Safety Administration (MSA) should be responsible for the Navigable waterways using professional resources whilst Local Transportation Authorities should be responsible for the safety management of the Substandard waterway. It is therefore important to classify waterways into navigable and substandard areas in order to apply for different safety administration measures. At present, the division of inland navigable and substandard waterways is not clear, and there are no systematic methods for the classification of waterways. This paper investigated the present conditions of the inland waterways in Ningbo, and a classification method is proposed which can classify waterways into navigable and substandard areas based on C2R model of data envelopment analysis (DEA). A case study was also carried out using the proposed method and the results were compared with those obtained using fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) method. It is found that unlike the FCE, the proposed method does not need to determine the exactly weights of the indicators which influence the classification of inland waterways and does not need to determine the membership function of the indicators, thus the results are more objective and reliable.