The maritime transport is one of the key elements of the international trade and world economy. In spite of the effects of the global financial crisis in 2009, in the last years the sector's post-crisis evolution has showed to keep a tendency to the growth.
Considering the ever-increasing demand for new port infrastructures in the areas of economic and social development, the authors introduce an innovative approach based on multi-criteria analysis as a decision support system for selecting a location for a new port.
The methodology proposed is based on the following fundamental elements:
- A review of the existing port terminals capacity to check the real needs, for the traffic considered, of a new infrastructure. The study takes into account the current capacity of the terminal and its potential capacity in the case of future planned expansion of the infrastructure. Besides, a comparison between the results of capacity obtained and the future tendencies of maritime traffic in the area is performed.
- An analysis of the coastal system considering both physical and geographical compatibility factors (depth, orography, connectivity, etc). Based on the infrastructure design and engineering, a preliminary study of the coast is carried out checking the physical and geometric compatibility between the infrastructure and the environment. Once the compatible areas are detected, the aspects that are most important in order to build a new port are analysed: road and rail accessibility, existence and proximity of areas of particular environmental interest, maritime climate conditions, suitable deposits (quarry) in the proximity and closeness to urban centres, etc.
- The application of a two-phase multi-criteria decision-making analysis.
The first phase evaluates the quality of the suitable places in function of physical, geographic and environmental factors. The best score locations are subjected to a second analysis based on socioeconomic criteria that take into account the economic development potential at the regional level.
Between the factors considered in this second phase, a very important role is playing by the production of goods and services in the area and by the position with regard to the main axis of the maritime trade system.
In both phases, in order to establish the level of importance of each factor considered, a Delphi approach has been used.
The methodological development proposed here has been applied to the case of the Spanish Mediterranean seaboard, using a container terminal design for large ship size, according with the evolution of world-wide fleet.