Port performance measurement in the context of port choice: an MCDA approach

Abstract

Purpose-Port performance and port choice have been treated as separate streams of research. This hampers the efforts of ports to anticipate on and respond to possible future changes in port choice by shippers, freight forwarders and carriers. The purpose of this paper is to develop and demonstrate a port performance measurement methodology, extended from the perspective of port choice, which includes hinterland performance and a weighting of attributes from a port choice perspective. Design/methodology/approach-A review of literature is used to extend the scope of port performance indicators. Multi-criteria decision analysis is used to operationalize the context of port choice, presenting a weighted approach using the Best-Worst Method (BWM). An empirical model is built based on an extensive port stakeholder survey. Findings-Transport costs and times along the transport chain are the dominant factors for port competitiveness. Satisfaction, reputation and flexibility criteria are the other important decision criteria. The results also show how the availability of different modal alternatives impact on the position of a port. A ranking of routes for hinterland regions is done. Originality/value-The paper focuses on two extensions of port performance measurement. So far, not all factors that determine port choice have been included in port performance studies. Here, first, factors related to hinterland services are included. Second, a weighting of port performance measures is proposed. The importance of factors is assessed using BWM. The approach is demonstrated empirically for a case of the European contestable hinterland regions, which so far have lacked quantitative analysis.

Bayesian best-worst method: A probabilistic group decision making model

“…The original BWM is presented as a non-linear optimization problem [9] , while there exists a linear approximation [10] , a multiplicative version [28] , and some hybrid versions such as BWM-MULTIMOORA [29] and BWM-VIKOR. The method has also been extensively used in many real-world applications including, but not limited to, transport and logistics [30][31][32] , supply chain management [33][34][35][36][37][38][39] , technology management [40] , risk management [41] , science and research assessment [42,43] , and energy [44,45] (see [46] for more recent advances in the BWM and its applications).…”

Towards a balanced E-Participation Index: Integrating government and society perspectives

“…Compared to other pairwise comparison-based methods such as the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), BWM is more efficient with respect to the amount of data that has to be collected to arrive at the weights and has been shown to have a higher reliability (Rezaei, 2016). The BWM has been applied to several real-world problems in other domains including technology management (Gupta & Barua, 2016), logistics (Rezaei, van Roekel, & Tavasszy, 2018;Rezaei, van Wulfften Palthe, Tavasszy, Wiegmans, & van der Laan, 2019), supplier selection and segmentation (Haeri & Rezaei, 2019;Rezaei et al, 2015;Rezaei, Nispeling, Sarkis, & Tavasszy, 2016), assessing the quality of scientific outputs (Salimi, 2017), energy (Kheybari, Kazemi, & Rezaei, 2019), and risk management (Torabi, Giahi, & Sahebjamnia, 2016. Using BWM and the data collected from the 23 experts, we obtained the optimal weights of the indexes (w 1 * , w 2 * , …, w n * ) (see Table 5). Of the three indexes used in the study, the Democracy Index received the largest weight (0.368), and the Human Development Index (0.317) and the EPI (0.314) came second and third respectively (the sum of weights is one).…”

An Examination of Port Choice Indicators and Critical Transportation Parameters as a Basis for Port Selection

“…[14] focused on port choice strategies for Qingdao, Tianjin and Dalian which are three major ports in China. [10] examined port choice in the context of port performance. This further buttresses the notion that there are underlying factors that determines port selection.…”