Risk management of liquefied natural gas transportation routes: An interactive consensus reaching approach under personalized individual semantics

Abstract

As the proportion of natural gas in China’s energy consumption increases, it has become an important issue to assess the risk of liquefied natural gas (LNG) transportation routes. This article explores its complexity which involves ship navigation, meteorology, ocean conditions, environment, law, politics and many other fields. Therefore, it requires a group decision support system consisted by multiple professional departments. In order to deal with the ambiguity of experts’ risk evaluations, it uses the personalized individual semantics (PIS) model to manage original risk evaluation matrices, where linguistic terms are converted into numerical values based on the rationality of risk evaluations from experts. Moreover, to reduce disputes about risk evaluation of LNG transportation routes among group experts from multiple departments, an interactive consensus reaching process (CRP) based on harmony constraint with bilateral negotiation mechanism is used to improve the agreement of final risk evaluation result. Finally, we use a case study of company to verify our risk evaluation framework of LNG transportation routes and provide some significant practical insights.