A multiobjective hierarchical model for environmentally sustainable port management in Malaysia

Ports play a critical role in facilitating global and national trade, however its operations generate significant environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions, high energy consumption, and waste generation. Malaysia ports such as Westport, Port of Tanjung Pelepas (PTP), Johor Port and Sabah Port are under growing pressure to implement environmentally sustainable practices while maintaining efficiency and competitiveness as the ports are responsible for over 90% of the nation’s trade. However, their progress has been inconsistent due to a lack of standardized frameworks for assessing port sustainability, fragmented governance structures, and the limitations of existing models in addressing uncertainty in expert evaluations. One of the biggest challenges today if the need to evaluate multiple environmental initiatives under conflicting objectives while still maintaining operational reliability. Moreover, dependence on traditional performance indicator and deterministic decision-making approaches often produces incomplete outcomes. Therefore, a solution that integrates expert-driven prioritization with quantitative performance assessment is necessary to address this gap and provide decision-makers with reliable tools for evaluating and enhancing port sustainability. Thus, this study develops a multi-objective hierarchical model that integrates the Intuitionistic Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (IF-AHP) to address uncertainty in expert evaluations and Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) to compute port-specific sustainability scores. The IF-AHP results indicate that landlord and regulatory functions possess the highest weights with 0.298 and 0.281 respectively, followed by operator with 0.265 and community function with 0.156. The MILP evaluation indicates that Port Klang and Port of Tanjung Pelepas exhibit the highest sustainability scores of 0.812 and 0.796, respectively highlighting a significant performance gap between leading and developing ports within the national network. In contrast, Penang Port and Kuantan Port achieved scores of 0.711 and 0.678, respectively highlighting variations in policy enforcement, technology adoption, and environmental initiatives. The comparative analysis indicates that the proposed IF-AHP-MILP model surpasses traditional AHP and Neutrosophic AHP methods by achieving Spearman correlation values above 0.8 and demonstrating robustness in sensitivity analysis with outcome variations limited to 0.2. The proposed model provides a data-driven framework that allows Malaysian ports to benchmark performance, prioritize resources, and align with the International Maritime Organization’s Net-Zero 2050 agenda and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. This integrated method enhances port sustainability assessment by combining methodological rigor with practical application, thus providing academic contributions and actionable guidance for policymakers and port authorities.