Model for comparative assessment of commercial seaports in global transport and logistics infrastructure

The main direction of economic development is the digitalization of business processes. It covers all sectors of the economy. The peculiarity of the current stage of digitalization is the expansion of its functional space, the universal transition from digitalization in the field of information exchange to digitalization of management of individual economic processes, as well as sectors of the economy and the economy as a whole. At the same time, the digitalization of management implies the availability of tools for forming managerial decisions. Such tools, in particular, are mathematical models. The development of such a model for the comparative assessment of commercial seaports in the global transport and logistics infrastructure is the purpose of this article. The model is based on the presentation of commercial seaports as vectors of their technological and economic parameters. Comparison of ports is provided by additive or multiplicative scalarization of these vectors taking into account the needs of participants of transport and logistics processes. Their needs, i.e. the purposes of comparing ports, are formalized by establishing the importance coefficients of technological and economic parameters for the participants of transport and logistics processes. Since participants in these processes are usually unable to directly quantify the importance coefficients, there is uncertainty. The article adopts a probabilistic interpretation of this uncertainty. The establishment of coefficients of relative importance of specific indicators of commercial seaports is based on the principle of maximum uncertainty. The second kind of entropy is taken as the measure of uncertainty. It has allowed to receive simple enough relations for an establishment of quantitative values of considered factors of importance. The proposed approaches are the basis for the creation of specific models and techniques in the interests of the participants of transport and logistics processes to justify a wide range of management decisions. In particular, they can be used to justify decisions on the development of logistics infrastructure of commercial seaports, as well as to attract investment in its development.