Grey clustering evaluation of service capacity of cruise homeports in China

ABSTRACT

The service capacity of a cruise homeport is the foundation of the cruise industry’s rapid development. This paper investigates cruise homeports’ service capacity in China in order to build a cruise homeport with high service capacity. First, we construct an evaluation index system by identifying the main factors that affect the service capacity of cruise homeports. Second, considering the cognitive uncertainty caused by decision-makers’ limited accessibility of information for a given concept, the grey number with known possibility function is applied. Based on this, we introduce the grey clustering model to evaluate each cruise homeport’s present service capacity and classify it based on the rank to which it belongs. The results reveal that the cruise homeports in China perform at different service capacity levels. On the whole, 69.23% of them have medium or higher service capacities, powerfully demonstrating development momentum.

KEYWORDS:

• Grey clustering evaluation
• cruise homeport
• service capacity
• possibility function

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Possibility theory is one of the many theories for the quantification of uncertainties with imprecise probabilities (Hose and Hanss 2021). It was proposed by Zadeh (1999), originating from the theory of fuzzy sets. Possibility distribution characterizes the possibility of an event occurring in the future (Yang, Linna, and Wang 2019). It describes the uncertainty in objective phenomenon.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural and Science Foundation of China [Grant Number 71971134] and Cruise Program from Ministry of Industrial Information and Technology of China [Grant Number MC-201917-C09]