Abstract
Geographical location, infrastructures, and services are the main consolidated pillars of a port in terms of its capacity to compete and cooperate with other ports. In the last years, a new pillar was identified: emerging technologies. Ports’ issues were initially solved with individual ICT solutions adopted by each decision-maker, which generated efficiencies in the three main port flows: cargo, information, and financial. However, new benefits and challenges are connected with the introduction of shared emerging ICT among decision-makers inside ports. The crucial issue concerns the fact that several decision-makers could share a decision about a single-port operation. Therefore, the effectiveness and efficiency of ports depend on how the interactions between the decision-makers are solved. Port operations are associated with movements (cargo) and transactions (information and financial) in a synchronic graph, which allows highlighting the role of emerging technologies in the modification of port operation generalized cost, considering the different decision-makers. The focal point concerns the building of a theoretical model using the formal equations of Transport System Models (TSMs) for the estimation of the cost for a Unit of Load (UL), e.g., a container traveling along a path, composed of a sequence of port operations, inside a port with and without emerging technologies. The proposed theoretical model provides the possibility of estimatingex antethe reduction of cost (port time of UL) given by introducing new technologies and a Port Community System (PCS). Different scenarios, considering some cases, ranging from the absence of ICT to the presence of a PCS, are compared, considering the different situations from a non-congested port to a congested one. The main results of the study and its novelty concern, on the one hand, the extension of TSMs to port systems, highlighting the problem of a non-single decision-maker (two or more) in some port operations and, on the other hand, the possibility of reducing the generalized cost (e.g., time) in the same operations in which there are concurrent decision-makers, through the use of an advanced PCS. The reported numerical example confirms the theoretical results. The work can be useful for researchers for port planners (e.g., port authorities) because it permits evaluating the utility for introducing shared emerging technologies using advanced PCS in a unified view.
Highlights
From ancient times, ports are the interface of freight transport between land and sea
Σp fk 0 ck(xk) dxk is the objective function to minimize, defined as the integral cost, depending on the vector, f, of flows; f opt,Deterministic User Equilibrium (DUE) is the optimum vector of flows, or DUE equilibrium vector of flows, for which costs associated with the choice of alternative ports are equal (it is the minimum value of function ζ(f)); ck(xk) is the marginal cost function of the individual Unit of Load (UL) on path/port k; fk is the flow at path/port k
This article considers the role of emerging Information Communication Technology (ICT) in the ports, focusing on the next-generation Port Community System (PCS)
Summary
Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, delle Infrastrutture e dell’Energia Sostenibile, Università degli Studi Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria, Reggio Calabria, Italy. Ports’ issues were initially solved with individual ICT solutions adopted by each decision-maker, which generated efficiencies in the three main port flows: cargo, information, and financial. Port operations are associated with movements (cargo) and transactions (information and financial) in a synchronic graph, which allows highlighting the role of emerging technologies in the modification of port operation generalized cost, considering the different decision-makers. The main results of the study and its novelty concern, on the one hand, the extension of TSMs to port systems, highlighting the problem of a non-single decision-maker (two or more) in some port operations and, on the other hand, the possibility of reducing the generalized cost (e.g., time) in the same operations in which there are concurrent decision-makers, through the use of an advanced PCS.
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