Adoption of Digital Technologies to Enhance Port Competitiveness in Maritime Trading Value Network: Future Research Directions through a Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Maritime trading is creating a critical transition to enhance the value network through digitalization in the global supply chain. As a node in this chain, ports should play their role effectively and efficiently in value creation in a sustainable manner. Digitalization is adding a new version with considerable changes in the trading environment. These technological changes establish a more collaborative, innovative, and sustainable business. Many researchers have been more concerned with the usage of technological applications than the future trends for enhancing port competitiveness. Competing abilities depend on well-thought-out planning and directing to achieve organizational goals while maximizing customer satisfaction. Therefore, this research objective is to identify the future directions of digitalization to strengthen the port's competitiveness. This objective is addressed using the systematic literature review (SLR) method, which makes the final results consider evaluated articles on emerging digitalization and port competitiveness concepts. For that, article sources were MDPI, Springer, and Emerald Insight, which were published during 2022–2023. Mainly, it was evaluating 60 articles for this research after scrutinizing 144. Those have been given open access and conducted peer review. This research found five major future directions in view of the positive relationship between digitalization and port competitiveness. It is helped by the identification of the characteristics of digitalization and port competitiveness. Their interrelationship guides identify the prominent future requirements of maritime trading: innovations, enhancing stakeholder networks, balancing port sustainability and commerciality, increasing the involvement of maritime institutions, and real-time information flow. The boundary line of these directions is interconnecting each direction. Especially currently, port activities are operated through sustainability initiatives, and economic, social, and environmental strategies are based on the whole range of external and internal environmental factors of the organization: political, economic, environmental, social, technological, and legal. Meanwhile, research has concluded that balancing sustainability and commerciality is the most important of these directions. Future research should be more concerned about these aspects due to the outcome of the sustainable port operation, which creates a win-win situation for each stakeholder in the network.