Content area
Full text
The objective of this paper is to identify the location selection criteria of new building shipyards. The identified criteria for shipyard location selection assists consultants, managers, and investors to realize and to analyze various location factors during their evaluation process of shipyard site alternatives and making final shipyard location selection appropriate to desideratum.
Keywords: shipyards; shipbuilding
1. Introduction
ENVIRONMENTAL, social, and technical factors influence the site location decisions for new shipyards. These factors introduce difficulties for making facility location decisions to establish, to reestablish, or to expand their operations for not only the shipbuilding industry but also any industries. A facility location decision problem encircles the identification of selection criteria, generation of alternatives, analysis of alternatives according to defined criteria, evaluation, and selection among alternatives phases. Power plants, logistic hubs and spokes, warehouses, railway terminals, container ports, and shipyards are adumbrative facilities to be located.
In any industrial application, facility selection usually starts with noticing and recognizing a need for additional capacity or a need for relocating available capacity. In today's booming shipping and shipbuilding market conditions, shipbuilding corporations and/or shipbuilding-related firms have been forced to relocate production facilities and/or locate new production facilities to respond to competitors' flexibility and needs and to adapt to rapidly changing conditions, as the total capacity of shipbuilding industry in all over the world increased more than twice since the 1990s, as shown in Fig. 1 (TURKTERMAP 2007). This shipbuilding market condition suggests that new sites for new building shipyards are essential in mid to long term. Thereafter, when the need for new sites has been recognized, factors and subfactors for location selection should be defined in a correct manner. Location selection factors could be qualitative or quantitative. Despite the fact that general industrial facility location decision studies have drawn increased and concentrated attention from both academic and business communities in the past two decades, none of them have tried to define the facility location selection criteria in a systematic way. Above all, it is obvious that almost none of the attention has been taken from the shipbuilding industry's academic and business communities until recently. After this step, the definition and decision of location selection criteria, a search for the best location should be started. Location selection problems...