Evaluation of Ship Repair Services: A Case Study of Taiwan Shipping Companies' Selection

Ship repairers are long-term cooperative partners of shipping lines that keep ships in a safe condition. This industry is a professional and technical enterprise. This study explores the critical factors affecting the selection of ship repairers by shipping lines. Ship repair services can be divided into repair yards and repair shops. Repair yards provide berths and dry docks for conducting repair engineering, while repair shops actually perform the ship repairs. Through an investigation of experts, two analysis hierarchies for yards and shops based on a fuzzy multicriteria decision-making (FMCDM) approach are proposed and applied to evaluate the repair services across the Taiwan Strait. The most important criteria in the analyses are repairers' offer terms, relative costs of the service, and technique performance as well as the arrangement of the repair period. Chinese repair yards have attracted shipping lines because of their advantages with respect to costs and productive facilities.