Abstract
This paper aims to recommend a promising alternative approach for evaluating the operation efficiency of the top 20 international container ports in Asia for the year 2004. Evaluation of efficiency for the target DMU (Decision Making Unit) with conventional DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) is to determine the most beneficial multipliers of input and output and derive the best efficiency that the target DMU can achieve with these multipliers. However, the available studies have not yet provided a satisfactory answer to the problem of making international comparisons of port efficiency. For performance enhancement, TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) can be employed to aggregate efficiencies in different aspects, which leads to an innovative two-stage relative efficiency estimation technique, called DEA/TOPSIS. Superior to the traditional DEA approach, determination of the overall ranks of the container ports with better precision is accessible based on the DEA/TOPSIS approach.
