Research on the site selection of overseas railway engineering logistics bases from the perspective of supply chain resilience: Take the China-Laos Railway as an example

Aiming to jointly build the Belt and Road Initiative with high quality and to better advance the construction of overseas railway projects, this paper aims at the reality of overseas railway projects in areas with fragile supply chains, such as lack of overseas railway resources, complex mountainous terrain, and harsh transportation environment. It studies the location selection of logistics bases, and provides an improvement path for the supply chain resilience of overseas railway projects from the perspective of optimizing the layout of logistics bases. Based on extensive field investigation and literature review, the influencing factors of logistics base location are identified and an evaluation index system is established. The Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) is employed, introducing fuzzy numbers at the weighting calculation stage to capture the uncertainty in expert judgments. Within a unified fuzzy analytical framework, both the weights of evaluation indices and the scores of alternative bases are calculated, and defuzzification is applied to obtain comparable and ranked comprehensive scores. Subsequently, considering constraints such as transportation demand, transshipment distance, and design capacity of each base, the FAHP scores are integrated into a quantitative optimization model together with objectives related to freight cost and investment cost, to produce the final optimal layout. The proposed method is validated using the overseas section of the China–Laos Railway, and the results match the actual logistics base locations, demonstrating that the approach is both scientifically rigorous and practically applicable. This research provides reference for the supply chain resilience construction and material support of the“the Belt and Road”railway project in the future overseas supply chain vulnerable areas. • A comprehensive evaluation system for overseas railway logistics base site selection is established from supply chain resilience perspective. • FAHP and quantitative optimization are integrated to handle uncertainty in site selection decision-making. • Multi-objective model considers transportation costs, investment costs, and qualitative penalty values. • China-Laos Railway validation proves the method's applicability in supply-chain-vulnerable regions. • Provides guidance for Belt and Road railway projects in overseas supply-chain-vulnerable areas.