Case study on relocation of port pnfrastructure using the Randomized Expert Panel Opinion Marginalizing Procedure

We present a case study related to the relocation of parts of port facilities in a Black sea port in Varna (Bulgaria). As the city and the port expanded over the years, the east sector of the port ended up being in the middle of the city center. This causes environmental and spatial planning problems to both the city and the port area. We present several alternatives to relocate part of the industrial activities of the port to another site further to the west sector of the port and utilize the emptied space for recreational, public and social activities. We then apply the Randomized Expert Panel Opinion Marginalizing Procedure (REPOMP) to rank the alternatives. The procedure utilizes a hierarchy of criteria to assess the alternatives from four major aspects - environmental, social, technological and economical. A total of 12 experts provided their estimates on how the alternatives meet all criteria as well as on the relative significance of each criterion. Bootstrap simulation is utilized to not only find the total marginal criterion of each alternative, but also its distribution and best estimate. We also tested whether there is significant difference between the ranking scores of the alternatives.