Port Community Systems: A structured literature review

Abstract

Abstract Port Community Systems (PCS) are inter-organizational software platforms that connects port community actors, enabling commercial services and information exchange between the port to their customers and a variety of stakeholders. Our main motivation for this paper lies in the absence of surveys on the PCS literature, hence the purpose of this paper is to perform a structured literature review on PCS to establish promising research gaps. Such review was conducted surveying the literature about PCS from 2001 until 2019. The study introduces a detailed and current worldwide PCS inventory using a proposed evolution framework and a taxonomy, the latter built upon commonly cited factors from the IT systems development literature in the context of port communities, which are synthesized into three frames: a Business frame, an Integration frame, and a Legal frame. Findings show that literature on PCS is scarce and fragmented, oftentimes with PCS research published in non-specialized documents on the topic, with few comparative studies between countries and several countries receiving little attention. Few authors have high specialization on the topic while most authors in average contribute less than once to the body of knowledge. Additionally, it was found that industry is ahead of scientific research in terms of documenting PCS development and technical features. The results also show a lack of innovation regarding PCS research studies, which risks relegating PCS research to irrelevance. A major critique to extant PCS literature is about its inertia, as research tends to be excessively comfortable with the legacy PCS, neglecting its need to evolve and adapt to new markets (in response to the growth of emerging economies) or to extended functionalities (taking advantage of the surge of new technologies). Furthermore, it was found that the future of PCS research should aim for addressing practical needs, while fostering collaboration among practitioners and scholars.