A Comparison of Efficiency with Productivity Criteria for European Container Ports

The shipping industry and the transportation of goods through ports have been rapidly growing owing to global economy, containerization of different types of goods, state of the art ship construction technology, and efficient logistics networks. As a nation's major infrastructure for international trade, porthas become important in its role as a connecting point between land and sea transportation. In global logistics environment, stiff competition among major ports worldwide to dominate and control the container market will get more intense.Therefore, ports strive to improve the service and facilities to attract more ships from across the world. As of 2008, more than 80% of international trade is done by sea transport and to meet the growing demand for goods transport, ports need to expand their capacity by improving the productivity of ports facilities. In this regard, this study focuses on the evaluation and comparison of port efficiency with 4 productivity criteria based on which the overall ranking will be determined. For the research, we employed PROMETHEE method to calculate the rank of the 19 European container ports.The result shows that the GioiaTauro, Valencia, and Rotterdam ports scored the first 3 ranks in the year 2010, respectively. The Rotterdam has the highest productive working hours but lowest productivity in crane utilization. Valencia has 2 criteria (berth, area) with the highest productivity but relatively longer working hours considering the throughput. GioiaTauro shows 69% or higher in 3 criteria(berth, area, crane) with the highest crane productivity, whereas the working hour is only 18% in productivity. Based on the result of the study, Rotterdam needs to take some measure to utilize the crane in more efficient way, while Valencia, and GioiaTauro require more flexible working hours in the direction of reducing the overall working hours of employees.