Status quo and innovative approaches for maritime logistics in the age of digitalization: a guest editors’ introduction

Inf Technol Manag DOI 10.1007/s10799-017-0282-z EDITORIAL Status quo and innovative approaches for maritime logistics in the age of digitalization: a guest editors’ introduction Leonard Heilig1 • Stefan Voß1,2 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2017 Maritime logistics can be regarded as the marriage between maritime transportation, handling and moving cargo between and within seaports, and principles of logistics and supply chain management. The unification of those different concepts aims at addressing evolving demands of customers, improving financial and operational performance, service quality, and environmental performance, growth, and corporate responsibility [6]. In recent years, this emerging discipline has attracted increasing attention in academia and practice. Especially the role of ports has drastically changed from its traditional function, connecting sea and landside by facilitating loading and unloading operations, to an essential part of global logistics networks that manages the flow of cargo and offers value-added logistics services in an efficient, effective, safe, and environmental-friendly manner. In this regard, one of the main challenges is to facilitate the coordination and collaboration among various involved actors, especially to manage activities at the interfaces in different phases of transportation, storage, and other logistics activities. Information systems and dedicated decision support systems manage related information flows and support organizational and inter-organizational decision making. Therefore, they are essential for facilitating integration and achieving the goals of maritime logistics strategies. In general, & Leonard Heilig Stefan Voß 1 Institute of Information Systems (IWI), University of Hamburg, 20146 Hamburg, Germany 2 Escuela de Ingenieria Industrial, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaı́so, Valparaı́so, Chile information systems already pervade nearly all activities in maritime logistics primarily used to acquire, process, exchange, and analyze data at a rapidly increasing volume and pace by applying advanced technologies and methods. After decades of digital transformation and automation, in particular in seaport and terminal operations (see, e.g., [2]), there is a growing demand to better utilize available and new data sources. With the increase of data sources comes the need to integrate internal and external information, after checking the reliability, quality, and veracity. Increasing the speed of processing from batch processing to real-time processing, a new door is opened to realize innovative maritime logistics approaches considering contextual and environmental factors in individual, crossfunctional, and inter-organizational activities. As such, the development of cutting-edge information systems and methods fully exploiting gathered information for problemsolving and decision making establishes a basis for realizing innovative maritime logistics strategies and approaches like, for instance, synchromodality and slowsteaming. Despite the growing importance of information systems in solving current and future challenges, little attention has been paid to this topic in the area of maritime logistics. The special issue promotes this line of research by focusing on the status quo and innovative approaches with respect to the collection and utilization of information in maritime logistics. The special issue includes four articles reflecting the state-of-the-art and providing different innovative approaches to cope with current challenges in maritime logistics. The focus is in particular on the utilization of information systems and decision analytics in ports and maritime shipping, which involves the development and application of information technology, operations research, statistics, simulation, and predictive analytics to support decision 123 Inf Technol Manag making and problem-solving. In general, those approaches aim to take organizations to a higher degree of transparency, intelligence, and competitive innovation. Thus, the special issue synthesizes different perspectives and solution approaches on real-world problems in the area of maritime logistics and points out new directions and opportunities for both science and business practice. The lead-in article of the special issue, entitled ‘‘Information systems in seaports: a categorization and overview’’ [3], introduces the reader to the current use of information systems in modern ports and connects between industry solutions and related scientific approaches. The relationships among information systems and underlying information technologies, referred to as enabling technologies, are reflected through a conceptual framework that classifies and surveys information systems vertically and horizontally according to their scope on port operations. The article shows not only how enabling technologies and information systems are currently aligned with port operations, but also how they can be utilized to address current and future challenges, for example, to compensate physical constraints of ports like inadequate infrastructure, capacity bottlenecks, accessibility issues, and environmental problems. The article emphasizes the role of international standards and further explains the link between new innovative information systems, gathering and processing real-time data on all levels of port operations, and existing decision analytics approaches, for example, with respect to vessel scheduling, berth allocation, and yard planning. In this context, new research opportunities are emphasized, such as with regard to improving the capability of ports to improve the economic and ecological performance, reliability, responsiveness, and quality of port operations. This involves, for example, predictive analytics to better forecast arrival and waiting times as well as the identification of errors and means to dynamically re-schedule activities to avoid/reduce cascading effects having a negative impact on the overall logistics chain. Innovative projects and solutions from industry are considered to emphasize the current interest in developing new applications and business models. However, we see that the gap between such topics in academia, receiving attention from scholars for many decades, and industry solutions is growing. Consequently, it seems that it becomes more important than ever to bidirectionally align and merge science and industry solutions. Overall, the article is the first, to the best of our knowledge, presenting an in-depth and comprehensive overview of the utilization of enabling technologies and information systems in ports. Note that the other papers in the special issue partly refer to the enabling technologies and information systems explained and discussed in this article. The second article is presented by Cimino et al. [1], entitled ‘‘Evaluating the impact of smart technologies on 123 harbor’s logistics via BPMN modeli (...truncated)