Multi-dimensional Assessment of Port Performance: A Composite measure

Abstract

Existing methods of port performance considering multi-criteria goals, system boundaries, subsystems, and components involving a set of assumptions have limitations and may even give contradictory results. The paper proposes the overall port performance index (OPPI) as a geometric aggregation of the ratios of indicators at a given period over a base period without considering the performance of other ports. The index also provides performance in each of the chosen dimensions, the identification of critical dimensions or indicators requiring managerial attention and quantifying the relative importance and contribution of each dimension/indicator. Replacing the base period vector with the vector for the previous year will indicate an improvement/decline of OPPI on a year-to-year basis. The proposed index avoiding scaling and weights satisfies desired properties of measurements like monotonically increasing, time-reversal test, formation of chain indices, statistical testing and estimation of population parameters. The chain indices find the growth of OPPI across time. The coefficient of variation of the index indicates growth consistency. The empirical illustration shows that the index improved for each Major Port in India in 2017 from 2012. However, the consistency of growth of OPPI varied amongst the ports. The method can be applied even for skewed data and enables additional dimensions and indicators to be included.