Seaport Positioning Supported by the Combination of Some Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches

Abstract

The ports’ management is facing the challenge of sustainable port development, considering several aspects: economic, technological, logistical, environmental, and community involvement. Although the numerous scientific concepts have been developed for explaining the trends of ports’ involvement into the logistics chains, this research work presents an attempt to draw the attention to the marketing aspect of the port mission, being focused primarily on the customers’ needs, whose preferences are the key factor in selecting specific port in competitive environment. Therefore, the Adriatic, Aegean, and Black Sea ports, sharing the unique marketing features and target market, have been analyzed with the aim to be mutually positioned. The considered ports have similar goals: to achieve the greater degree of competitiveness as well as to acquire the larger number of customers being attracted on the basis of superior port choice criteria. These circumstances have been explored through some distinctive quantitative and qualitative criteria by employing the appropriate, well known and structured quantitative PROMETHEE and AHP method. The obtained results are presented by perception maps, and described on the basis of gained quantitative indicators and the qualitative explanations given by the authors, primarily, in the marketing manner.

E-Services and Positioning of Passenger Ports in the Context of Cruise Tourism Promotion

“…The detailed survey of their applications in sea port positioning is given in [36]. In this paper the combination of binary approach for the purpose of sublimation of a rather large number of employed criteria (i.e.…”

“…In line with the previously noted, the comparative analysis of the availability of e-services and traffic intensity should be realized as part of next research steps in this domain. Besides these rather general conclusions, on the basis of research conducted in the paper, the following more precise conclusions might be derived as well: -Some relevant e-services of eleven analyzed cruising ports in EU, including the Montenegrin Port of Kotor as cruising one, have been identified and categorized; -The relatively large number of identified e-services have been sublimed per each category by simple binary approach, as a way of data pre-processing for the following quantitative and qualitative analysis; -Multi-expert choice expressed in the form of Saaty matrix and the corresponding mathematical analyses [33][34][35][36] have been used for ranking the considered e-service categories; -The final rank of the analyzed cruise ports is determined by combining binary and Saaty approaches (see Table 4 for final numerical results); -On the basis of conducted calculus for each (all) type(s) of considered e-services, it becomes clear that ports: Southampton and Venice should be treated as models or ideal cruise ports for positive repositioning of all the other ports considered in this paper on the (global) cruise port market (see Table 1 for some more details on e-services they offer); and, -The Port of Kotor should be repositioned according to all explored categories of e-services especially regarding the transactional ones. These observations should be used as a particular base for further more detailed and rigorous investigation in this challenging sphere, concerning cruise ports development and their proper (re)positioning at the (global) permanently and rapidly developing cruise port market.…”

A Case Study on Introducing E-learning into Seafarers’ Education

“…It is obvious that all  max values, for each considered matrix, are less than 0.01, which is to be fulfi lled in order to provide a satisfying degree of the Saaty matrix consistency (Table 3). For these calculus, the appropriate Mathematica (5.1) programs have been used [2]. Th e results presented in Tables 2 and 3 have been realized in Mathematica (5.1) program, and the following pseudo-code is given in Table 4 [2].…”

Employing Wireless Networks in Enhancing Occupational Safety at the Developing Seaport – Two Proposals

“…Previous research in this field indicates that underdeveloped sea ports at the South Adriatic region suffer from the lack of the appropriate ICT solutions [1,3,4]. Some of the analyzed sea ports in this basin, e.g., Bar, Durres and Ploce, do not provide all, or some of the following smart operation processes: vessel monitoring, automatic containers control, scheduling and stacking containers, monitoring of cargo in stock, etc.…”

“…However, it is not to be forgotten, transportation and traffic are still physical acts and all ports therefore need terminals including all corresponding capacities and features. The sea ports need primarily the adequate infra and supra-structural capacities, adequate organization, sustainability development planning and numerous other structural, financial, and environmental issues which form the foundation for the ICT superstructures [1,2]. This holds true for huge developed sea ports like Shanghai, Singapore, Hong-Kong, Busan, Rotterdam, Kaohsiung, Hamburg, Antwerp, Felixstowe, etc.…”