CLUSTERING TURKISH CONTAINER PORTS BASED ON PHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES AND EFFICIENCY SCORES

Due to the significant impact of port performance on overall performance of global supply chains, enhancing the efficiency of terminal operations is an important task for ports to achieve a competitive edge. By acknowledging the role that efficiency plays in port competition, there are many research in the literature revealing the relative efficiencies of ports that are under investigation and providing managerial implications for the ones that are relatively inefficient. However, in many cases, the results obtained from the efficiency analysis can be misleading on its own as the ports may have different natures in terms of their size, cargo flow potentials or the environment that they are embedded in. Therefore, focusing on Turkish container ports, our study aims to classify the ports by taking both their physical attributes and efficiency scores into consideration. In order to determine the efficiency scores our study applies data envelopment analysis and the classification of the terminals is carried out by the application of cluster analysis. Results of the clustering lead to better assessment of benchmarking options for the ports and provide a general overview of the characteristics of Turkish container port industry.