Formation & Application Of A Container Terminal Projects' Decision-Making Model For Investors With Shipping Company's Background

With the upgrading development of the global economy, the development of the container transportation has become as an important indicator to the development of different countries'economies. As a crucial link in the chain of the container transportation, the container terminal has come to be the focus of different countries to invest and develop. The investment doors to this industry have been broadly opened which allures many investors actively enter into this industry, formerly monopolized by local authorities with steady returns. Among them, the investors with the background of shipping companies are growing to be a main force in the industry.This thesis focuses on the study of the factors that affect the investment decision-making to the project of the container terminal from the stand of the investors with background of shipping companies and after then sets up a model to assist the investment decision-making。Based on the analysis and study on the background of the container terminal industry, and the analysis and study on the particular purposes of the container terminal investors with background of shipping companies, the thesis has found out the evaluators in three categories, which are the surroundings, the economy, and the industry-supporting. Under the three categories, there are seven main evaluators, which are the container volume of the port, the economy of the hinterland, the IRR, the profit ratio to the capital, the accumulated earning before tax, the supporting ratio to the relevant industries in the group, the participating ratio of the investor, that mainly affect the decision-making to the project of container terminal from the stand of the investors with background of shipping companies.After then, with the application of the theory of BP neural network in the system of artificial neural network, from these seven main evaluators, the thesis has set up the frame of a decision-making model of container terminals for the investors with background of shipping companies. Based on this frame, with the utilization of two software platforms, Visual Basic and Access, a program with friendly interface and easy operation has been compiled out.The thesis uses the data of the sample container terminal projects from a terminal investment company with the background of shipping companies as the database to the model and put the database into the model for primary training and validating the model. After times of trial computation and comparison on the three parameters, the number of the nodes of the hidden layer, the momentum factor and the learning rate, that impact the running effect of the model, the thesis has chosen out the respectively appropriate value of these three parameters which makes the relatively less errors from the network of the model and relatively fewer times of calculation, and then a relatively optimized structure of the model comes into form.After training and validating the relatively optimized decision-making model by the data of the sample projects, the weighs of the respective layer's nodes in the model have been decided and a relatively stable and usable decision-making model for the investment of container terminal projects comes out, which could then be applied as an assistant to the investors with background of shipping companies for decision-making of some other container terminals in future.Finally, the thesis tests the application of the decision-making model by another sample project from the terminal investment company with the background of shipping companies. The sample project for testing is just under consideration of investment decision-making.