A multicriteria decision model for sustainable port functions in environmental perspectives

Port operations, while critical to global trade and economic growth, contribute significantly to environmental pressures through activities such as vessel traffic, cargo handling, dredging, and on-dock transportation, leading to emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. Hence, it is of priority to have a systematic evaluation and prioritization of sustainability measures across port functions. This study employs a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), to evaluate and prioritize key functional roles and subfunctions that contribute to port sustainability performance. By engaging expert judgment from two leading ports in Malaysia, the analysis identifies stakeholder priorities on the emphasis among landlord, operational, regulatory and community functions in sustainable port management. The structured AHP framework ensures transparency and reproducibility of the weighting process while remaining adaptable to incorporate emerging sustainability measures, such as green hydrogen bunkering. The results show that the experts from two major ports expressed differing perspectives on the highest priority function with the Landlord function (at 0.370) being the top priority for Northport and the Regulatory Function (at 0.664) to be ranked highest for Johor Port. Details analysis indicates that the difference is not significant. The findings may offer useful insights for guiding resource allocation, encouraging consensus-building workshops to align stakeholder perspectives, and providing a preliminary foundation for future research on sustainability frameworks. Moreover, this study can contribute to supporting policymakers, port practitioners, and researchers in making more informed and balanced decisions toward advancing environmentally sustainable port operations.