This applied research has been conducted to identify and rank the causes of delay in container handling operation in two stages. In the first, having considered the daily census of container handling operation in the pertinent terminal of the port, As well, brain storming cessions attended by experts from the studied container terminals were held during which twenty seven numbers of causes of delay were detected. In the second stage, having considered the detected factors from the first stage, the probability of the causes occurrence, the extent of impact of causes on process after their occurrence and probability of causes detection before having effect on process have been determined by experts in form of a scale ranging from one to ten, Finally based on the obtained scores by each one of the causes, the decision matrix was formed and the mentioned causes were ranked by TOPSIS method. The abstained results showed that the causes of delays in loading and unloading operations in studied container terminals have significant different in the terms of probability of the causes occurrence, the extent of impact of causes on process after their occurrence and probability of causes detection before having effect on process. Finally to mitigation of these causes several strategies have been presented
