Examination of fleet performances of countries with multi-criteria decision making methods

Maritime transportation is a type of transportation that has changed from the past to the present. The increase in trade volume with globalization causes an increase in the demand for transportation. Sea transportation is advantageous compared to other transportation types in terms of cost and reliability in intercontinental travels, transportation of high volume products. The maritime merchant fleets of countries are one of the important determinants of their performance in maritime transport. For this reason, it is important to determine the indicators that are important in the fleet performance of the countries. On the other hand, in order to make a macro-scale analysis of maritime transport, the fleet performances of the countries should be examined comparatively. In this study, Multi-Criteria Decision Making Methods were used to weight the fleet performance indicators of the countries in 2018-2021 and to rank the countries according to the weighting results. CRITIC in weighting indicators; VIKOR method was used in ordering the alternatives and calculations were made in Excel application on the threshold of formulas. In terms of fleet performances of G20 countries, competitiveness and trade intensity were examined in which years. While there are studies on fleet performances and multi-criteria decision-making methods in the literature; The fact that the fleet performance indicators of the countries are not determined by the CRITIC-based VIKOR method constitutes the original aspect of this study. According to the findings, the importance levels of the fleet performance indicators in 2018-2019 were listed as Maximum Cargo Carrying Capacity of Ships, Maximum Size of the Ship, Average Size of the Ship, Average Cargo Carrying Capacity per Ship, Average Age of the Ships and Average Time of the Ships in the Ports. In 2020 and 2021, the importance levels of Average Time in Ports and Average Age of Ships have changed compared to 2018 and 2019. In the ranking of countries, it was seen that Japan, Malaysia and the Netherlands showed high performance. When the G20 countries are evaluated, Japan, the United Kingdom and Germany are the countries with high performance.