Collaborative maritime and port transportation: A literature review

Maritime shipping plays a vital role in global trade, involving a multitude of actors such as shipping lines, ports, and diverse logistics providers. Collaborative operations planning among those actors is imperative to advance overall efficiency and comply with increasingly strict decarbonization policies. Recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Red Sea crisis have further highlighted this need for collaboration and have led the sector to create new forms of collaboration to enhance its resilience. Although collaborative transportation strategies have been suggested for decades, the related literature on maritime transport remains fragmented, lacking a comprehensive literature review of related research as is available for other transportation modes. In this work, we present a systematic survey on collaboration within the maritime and port transportation sector, taking a critical look at the challenges these collaborative systems face and mapping ways in which Operations Research (OR) methods are used to address them. Building on the two main forms of vertical and horizontal collaborations, we distinguish the involved stakeholders, analyze collaboration approaches, classify decision support and OR approaches, and discuss practical applications, leading to a research agenda that outlines specific challenges for future research. In this way, we connect the fragmented problems and approaches to a roadmap for future collaborative maritime and port transportation systems. This survey helps maritime researchers and practitioners find the right methods for their challenges and gain insight into directions for future collaboration, catalyzing both further research in academia and industrial implementations. This survey further facilitates advanced collaboration in maritime transportation systems, showing pathways towards visions of large-scale collaboration such as the Physical Internet.