Seaport Data Space for Improving Logistic Maritime Operations

The maritime industry expects several improvements to efficiently manage the operation processes by introducing Industry 4.0 enabling technologies. Seaports are the most critical point in the maritime logistics chain because of its multimodal and complex nature. Consequently, coordinated communication among any seaport stakeholders is vital to improving their operations. Currently, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Port Community Systems (PCS), as primary enablers of digital seaports, have demonstrated their limitations to interchange information on time, accurately, efficiently, and securely, causing high operation costs, low resource management, and low performance. For these reasons, this contribution presents the Seaport Data Space (SDS) based on the Industrial Data Space (IDS) reference architecture model to enable a secure data sharing space and promote an intelligent transport multimodal terminal. Each seaport stakeholders implements the IDS connector to take part in the SDS and share their data. On top of SDS, a Big Data architecture is integrated to manage the massive data shared in the SDS and extract useful information to improve the decision-making. The architecture has been evaluated by enabling a port authority and a container terminal to share its data with a shipping company. As a result, several Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have been developed by using the Big Data architecture functionalities. The KPIs have been shown in a dashboard to allow easy interpretability of results for planning vessel operations. The SDS environment may improve the communication between stakeholders by reducing the transaction costs, enhancing the quality of information, and exhibiting effectiveness.