Ranking Iranian Provinces in Transportation Industry Using Shannon Entropy and Taguchi Loss Function

Transport industry is one of the important and economic elements of each region. Because, in addition to that it is considered as an important and fundamental part, it affects many other activities of the societies and provides the possibility of appropriate productivity of potential capacity of the country. It is important that which province has more capacities in this industry and may help the managers in making better decisions to allocate resources and facilities and develop planning. Despite the importance of this industry, there has been little study about ranking the provinces in this industry. The aim of this research is to evaluate and rank the provinces in the field of transport. For this purpose, firstly, transport industry is divided to four parts of air transport, sea transport, freight transport, and passenger transport. For each part, appropriate indexes have been determined according to the library studies and interview with experts, and data are derived from valid statistical references. Then, indexes weights have been calculated by using Shannon Entropy in each part and then, with regard to the operation in each of the four parts, the provinces were ranked by using Taguchi Loss Function. This research is a descriptive analytical one, research domain is all provinces of the country, and the time period is the year 2012. According the results, in passenger transport, Semnan Province received the first rank and Yazd Province received the last rank. In freight and air transports, Tehran Province won the first rank and Golestan and Esfahan Provinces respectively had the last rank in these two parts. In sea transport, Hormozgan Province was in the first rank and Khuzestan Province in the last one.