Application of TOPSIS to the Selection of Project Execution Options in the Maritime Sector of Nigeria

In maritime sector of Nigeria, several techniques are employed to award contract. The alternatives of awarding contracts considered in this research are direct labour, local firms, foreign firms, combination of direct labour and local firm, combination of direct labour and foreign firm, and combination of local firm and foreign firm. The five criteria used for the selection are project cost, quality of project, project delivery time, impact of project execution on the economy and acceptability of the project by the locals. TOPSIS approach was applied to select the best alternative based on the five stated criteria. The TOPSIS approach requires the formulation of a decision matrix which entries indicate the performance of each alternative against each criterion. Decision matrixes were obtained from experts from the field, through questionnaires. It was found that project quality has the highest weight of 0.95, followed by project cost with a weight of 0.9. Project delivery time has the lowest weight of 0.7. TOPSIS scores of 0.5675 and 0.4781 for awarding contracts to foreign firms and combination of foreign and local firms, respectively. Awarding contracts to foreign firms is the best alternative, followed by awarding contracts to a combination of foreign and local firms.