Designing Port Services via Fuzzy Quality Function Deployment

Abstract

The objective of this study is to develop a proposal for developing port services that can improve the service quality by accurately satisfying the customer requirements. In this study, a four-stage process was identified. In the first stage, data envelopment analysis (DEA) was used for measuring the efficiency of the container terminals. In the second stage, the requirements of the port customers were identified, and confirmatory factor analysis was applied for satisfying these requirements. Further, in the third stage, the consistency of the binary comparison matrices which consist of customer requirements was evaluated using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). In the final stage, the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAH P) and fuzzy quality function deployment (FQFD) were jointly used for designing the port services. According to results, the resources requirement is considered to the most important criterion among the main criteria to improve the service quality of the port. Further, FQFD was used for designing of P1 port's service. FQFD was concluded that the quality of the equipment, facilities, and technological infrastructure have to be improved for increasing the service quality of P1 port.