Title: Optimising the location of a hub port in Thailand for arrival of Dawei and Pakbara ports

Authors: Sakaradhorn Boontaveeyuwat

Addresses: Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering at Sriracha, Kasetsart University, Sriracha Campus, 199 , Moo 6, Tungsukla, Sukhumvit Rd., Sriracha, Chonburi 20230, Thailand

Abstract: This paper considers a hub port selection problem for Thailand by evaluating the Dawei and Pakbara ports based on expected hub competition among other existing major ports in Southeast Asia that focus on servicing the local demands for container transport in Thailand. The infrastructure capability of ports in handling containers at berths is also analysed. The cargo supply and demand come from several ports in the world considered as the origin and destination points for 76 provinces in Thailand. A mixed integer programming model is developed to minimise the total system costs, taking into account vessel operating cost, port cost and inland logistics cost considered as three modes of transport: road, waterway-road and rail-road modes. In total, the model consists of 26,755 decision variables, five integer variables and 82,690 constraints. The results show that the two foreign ports (Port Klang and Singapore ports) are a better choice than the two new arrivals (Pakbara and Dawei ports) for serving Thailand local demands and are close runners up to Laem Chabang port.

Keywords: hub port; cost minimisation; Dawei port; Pakbara port; mixed integer programming; P-hub median problem; Thailand.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLSM.2018.089788

International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2018 Vol.29 No.3, pp.271 - 295

Received: 10 Mar 2016
Accepted: 30 Sep 2016
Published online: 12 Feb 2018 *

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