Container Port Operational Performance Assessment

With today’s rather comprehensive port infrastructure and facilities information made available on public-domain Internet websites by port authorities and operators, it is possible to collect very good quality detailed data and information from such sources alone. This paper presents a case analysis based on 40 major ports in East and Southeast Asia. It demonstrates that good quality port infrastructure and container handling facilities data obtained can be used to derive a statistically significant predictive model of annual port throughputs. The derived information offers meaningful port productivity evaluation and efficiency benchmarking among the 40 ports analyzed. The analysis makes use of the commonly available technique of statistical regression to establish the predicted level of performance. The simplicity of the approach, plus the fact that all required inputs are public domain data obtainable from port websites, permits owners/operators of individual ports or any other users to perform additional analysis if required.