Review of Theoretical Aspects on the Studies of Port Selection Criteria

The circumstances surrounding world ports have changed rapidly and port competition to attract cargoes has been increasing fiercely. Specifically, deploying large container vessels resulted fewer port visits and strategic alliance among liner shipping companies. Recently, many studies have worked for improving port competitiveness. However, these studies were limited to evaluation of only port competitiveness and few studies suggested strategies for reinforcing port competitiveness. Although implications of these previous studies are practically available to build policies for port, there have been very few academic studies such as identifying port competitiveness and port selection with related attributes for reasonable evaluation and analysis. Therefore, this study aims to classify the existing studies, which dealt with port selection problem, based on basic structure that was suggested by Murphy (1992). Furthermore, the conceptual definition will be carried out by comparison analysis in terms of time of study, type of data and methodology and decision factor of each study.