Establishment of shipyard siting criteria and evaluation with geographical information system

More than 80 % of the world trade by volume and more than 70% of economic value is being transported on board ships and handled in the ports. Consistent with this fact, globally, the prominence of the maritime industry in terms of trade, development, and sustainability is indispensable. Moreover, for Turkey, a developing country with a coastline of 8333 km, the significance of seaborne trade and related industries shall not be undervalued. Due to this fact, the shipbuilding market and related investments are recognized curial for both global trade and the national economy. Considering the potential economic gains and benefits of sea-borne trade on the national basis the prominence of the improvements in the shipbuilding industry and the necessity for the new investments and the modernized shipyards becomes apparent. The regions and specific sites were chosen for the new yacht and shipbuilding investments, presenting a remarkable capital and additional employment, have an essential influence for the sake of the achievement. The facts that the high investment costs for the infrastructure and the inconvenience of relocation make the allocation strategy and decision worthy of notice. In other words, the lack of necessary and appropriate siting criteria may become the main reason of the malinvestment. In this study, in order to determine the principal criteria for choosing construction areas for shipyards, besides a number of existing shipyards' and related foundations' representatives, officials from the related administrations were questioned and interviewed. Afterwards, the first communications more extensive and oriented criteria were developed with the aim of efficiency. In the sequel, the siting criteria were prioritized by using, one of the multi-criteria decision-making methods, so-called Analytical Hierarchy Proses (AHP) for the Iskenderun Bay region which is chosen as the area of this study. Following the collection and processing the data related to these criteria, the Geographic Information System (GIS) was utilized to create the thematic maps of the site. As a result, considering all the criteria-based maps, some possible and best-suited areas for shipyards' investments in İskenderun Bay were suggested. Moreover, the results of the developed comparison of existing settlement and this study's outcomes revealed that the chosen sites were already mainly being served as ports which clearly presented the legitimacy of this study's findings.