Evaluation of Industry 4.0 Application Scenarios in Tuzla Shipyards Using Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Methods

Shipyard digital transformation is often framed as an end-state technology program, yet managers must first determine where implementation should begin. This study develops a staged decision-support framework for Tuzla newbuilding shipyards. Fourteen experts screened 15 anonymized candidate yards, and the 5 retained yards formed a composite prototype evaluated by all respondents. Five digitalization scenarios (S1–S5) were assessed using three complementary structures: a customized interaction-based decision matrix (25 operational factors, panel consensus), the analytic hierarchy process (AHP; five main criteria weighted from individual pairwise judgements, with 17 sub-criteria used to decompose them), and entropy-weighted MULTIMOORA (the same 17 sub-criteria evaluated through the ratio system, reference point approach, and full multiplicative form). Implementation burden was assessed separately across seven anchored ordinal dimensions. All three operational methods produced the ordering S5 > S3 > S4 > S2 > S1; S5 represents the long-term target rather than a starting point. The final MULTIMOORA ordering was preserved in 102 deterministic weight-perturbation tests and 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations. Burden sensitivity showed that S4 carries a lighter coded burden than S3, whereas their gain-to-burden ratio ordering depends on how the ordinal bands are spaced. The framework identifies S3 and S4 as the decision-relevant transition alternatives.