TCFQ - Special Session: Smart Solutions for Climate-Resilient Port and Maritime Transport Systems

Digital Twin technology is emerging as a transformative tool in inland waterway transport, enhancing operational reliability and efficiency. This paper explores the application of DTs in predicting water levels and optimizing transport infrastructure, based on the experience of the European Union's CRISTAL project. The study highlights challenges such as data availability constraints and the need for continuous monitoring. By leveraging real-time data, historical records, and machine learning, DTs provide predictive analytics that improve navigability, reduce maintenance costs, and enhance decision-making for port operations. Key functionalities of DTs in IWT include real-time condition monitoring, advanced forecasting capabilities, and early warning systems. The findings demonstrate that DT implementation leads to increased resilience, sustainability, and efficiency in inland navigation. The study concludes that while DTs offer significant advantages, further improvements in data granularity and interoperability are necessary to maximize their potential in the maritime transport sector.

Navigation locks are complex structures crucial for water management. While locks facilitate vessel passages over essential hydraulic structures, they also form bottlenecks in water transport systems by inducing vessel delays. Furthermore, lock operation can impact freshwater availability, as freshwater is lost and saltwater intrudes. Consequently, during droughts, authorities often impose ad-hoc operational countermeasures to reduce these impacts. However, these impacts are often not quantified, potentially leading to ineffective measures or excessive vessel delays. To enhance decision-making regarding these countermeasures, we present a simulation-based method that jointly quantifies lock vessel delays, freshwater loss, and saltwater intrusion. Using geospatial, vessel, and hydrodynamic data, we apply the method to the sea lock complex on the route to the Port of Amsterdam, demonstrating its validity and effectiveness in a real-world setting. By testing various countermeasures, we find that vessel clustering based on maximum waiting time is most effective in reducing saltwater intrusion while keeping vessel delays acceptable, outperforming the common practice of limiting lock operation hours. Although further improvements are possible, the current method enables objective decision-making regarding resilient lock operation strategies worldwide in light of climate change.

This study has used statistical surveys data received from employees in the port industry to understand the mutual impact between port resilience, port performance, and port organizational culture. The research framework employs three abilities of the resilience triangle (shock absorption ability, original operation ability, and adaptability ability) to measure port resilience that could be used to mitigate the impacts occurred from any discontinuous events. The organizational culture dimension can be further divided into three sub-dimensions, including organizational communication culture, organizational learning culture, and risk management culture. Previous literature has exhibited how the resilience will impact the organizational culture and finally the business performance, and also how organizational culture will affect the business performance. Our research findings supported previous literatures reports, and this research further finds adaptive capability and recovery capability has higher degree of impacts on organizational culture than absorptive capability does. In addition, the three capabilities of the port resilience all have significant and higher degree of impacts on port performance than the organizational culture does. Our research also partially supports the trinity of resilient organization framework proposed by Riana Steen in the early 2010s.