Transhipment Port Selection and Decision-making Behaviour: Analysing the Taiwanese Case

Abstract

The study uses the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) technique to determine the importance of various criteria in the transhipment port selection decision-making process. The authors propose a set of transhipment port selection criteria from a container carrier's perspective. Sourcing the data from an AHP survey in Taiwan, transhipment port selection is found, tenuously at this first stage of research, to depend mainly on port competitiveness as represented by the cost that carriers are faced with for loading and discharging of containers and on port efficiency as represented by the container loading and discharging rates. Fuzzy multiple criteria decision-making methodology (FMCDM) was applied to obtain evaluations of port alternatives and the relevant responses de-fuzzified to derive crisp values of port performance.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for helpful and constructive comments as well as the editors of the issue. Thanks are expressed to Dr Malcolm Beynon for comments in the early stages of the writing of the paper. Professor S. Yahalom and Mr P. Chou from the National Taiwan Ocean University provided valuable comments to the first author in the initial stages of this research.