Certification-driven green port transition as an ex-ante scenario prioritization problem: A hybrid FAHP–IF-TOPSIS framework

Certification-driven sustainability requirements increasingly compel medium-scale ports to choose among competing transformation pathways under regulatory uncertainty and financial constraints. Yet dominant port sustainability research remains focused on ex-post-performance assessment, offering limited guidance for ex-ante prioritization of alternative transition scenarios. This study formulates certification-oriented green port transition as an uncertainty-aware scenario prioritization problem and proposes a hybrid Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process–Intuitionistic Fuzzy TOPSIS (FAHP–IF-TOPSIS) framework for structured decision-making under heterogeneously weighted expert judgment. FAHP derives criterion weights from pairwise comparisons, explicitly accommodating linguistic imprecision; IF-TOPSIS ranks transformation alternatives by preserving membership, non-membership, and hesitation degrees to capture expert ambiguity in scenario evaluation. The framework is demonstrated on Samsun Port, a representative medium-scale Black Sea port operating under Türkiye's Green Port Certification regime. Five strategic criteria—certification robustness, capital commitment rigidity, operational restructuring complexity, traffic system integration, and long-term environmental performance—are used to evaluate three transformation scenarios. FAHP weighting reveals that certification robustness (w = 0.302) and capital rigidity (w = 0.235) jointly dominate the decision structure. IF-TOPSIS ranks integrated green logistics and traffic management (A3, score = +0.046) first, followed by infrastructure and process efficiency transformation (A2, −0.009) and minimal compliance adaptation (A1, −0.049). An equal-weight expert re-aggregation counterfactual preserves the complete baseline ordering. Ordinal robustness analysis across eleven criterion-emphasis scenarios confirms that the baseline ranking is conditionally stable: A3 retains leadership under certification- and capital-oriented scenarios, while operational restructuring complexity acts as the key leverage criterion capable of altering strategic preference under extreme emphasis. The framework provides a transferable pre-investment prioritization structure for medium-scale ports navigating certification-driven sustainability transitions.