Springer Nature: IWI paper nominated as "world-changing"

11 June 2018, by Julia Bachale

Photo: Pixabay

According to SpringerNature, the scientific paper "Digital transformation in maritime ports: analysis and a game theoretic framework", published in Volume 18 of Springer journal Netnomics in Dec 2017, has the potential to change the world.

In the paper, the authors Leonard Heilig, Eduardo Lalla-Ruiz, and Stefan Voß claim that digitalization is pushing the maritime industry beyond its traditional limits and provides many new opportunities to enhance the productivity, efficiency, and sustainability of logistics. The concept of smart ports, for instance, aims to adopt modern information technologies to enable a better planning and management within and between ports. Strong facilitators of the digitalization are investments into technology and cooperations for promoting information sharing and a better coordination and collaboration, often regarded as a stumbling block in highly competitive environments. Besides many new opportunities, important economic issues and problems arise. We provide an overview of the development and state-of-the-art of digital transformation in modern seaports in order to identify current potentials and barriers. Focusing on the crucial and challenging aspects of coordination and collaboration, the paper presents a conceptual game-theoretic framework that allows benefits and cost allocations considering inter-, intra-, and meta-organizational perspectives. It further demonstrates how this framework can be used to develop tools and methods for supporting strategic decision-making for driving the digital transformation in seaports and addressing new economic issues and problems.