A Framework for Adopting a Sustainable Smart Sea Port Index

Abstract

The new business environment, and the new era of digital transformation put pressure on the global supply chain and accordingly on ports to cope with such changes; these require ports to be smarter and adapt to the new technological approaches. Smart ports SP express the prevailing trend for the transformation strategies. Although many previous studies discuss smart ports requirements there is no integrated vision provided before to capture different comprehensive elements of smart port and show its impact on sustainably. Therefore, this research aims at developing an integrated smart port index SPI, capturing different elements of SP and linking them to port sustainability performance. The research conducted a systematic literature review to identify all pillars that are required for the smart port adaptation and showed its impact on sustainability with a full-text reading stage that resulted in 48 articles. The paper indicated that few studies of the SPI have been proposed before to improve SP activity in different domains: operations, environment, energy, safety, and security; however, there is a need to address the several key issues related to port operations, and to consider human resources factor as part of the smart port requirement, particularly an integrated index that captures different pillars in SP elements and shows its effect on sustainable performance. The study reveals that SP initiatives around the world have different integration levels. According to this, the smart port index can be considered as the first integrated index linked to sustainability and including human resources; however, there are some limitations that could be an open issue to future researchers and practitioners to foster new practical research initiatives that can rely on this index to adapt the smart port practices in different ports, taking into consideration the human resources aspect and testing their impact on port sustainability.