Abstract:

In the port operating process, it is aimed to use various infrastructure and superstructure inputs for freight handling and serving ships and intended to generate revenue from handled freights and served ships. Therefore, two sequential stages appear in the port operating process. In this process, the outputs from the first stage are the inputs to the second stage. Port managers would aim to maximize the freight handled and the number of served ships with using the existing resources in the first stage and then, maximize the revenue from handled freights and served ships in the second stage. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) which is the most widely used technique to estimate port efficiency was designed for the single stage processes and it is inadequate in two-stage operations. In order to overcome this limitation, some DEA based two-stage techniques were developed and used. In this study, a two-stage DEA model was proposed for measuring the port efficiency and applied to a number of Turkish ports. Results show that two-stage DEA approach provides more proper results than those in single stage DEA when there are sequential stages. It is expected that the proposed two-stage DEA model may contribute both literature and practice.

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