Assessing the Maturity of Digital Twinning Solutions for Ports

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the development and maturity of digital twin solutions in major ports, proposing a framework of core aspects and maturity levels to guide future implementations and benchmarking efforts.

Contribution

It introduces a structured framework of core aspects and maturity levels for digital twins in ports, and applies it to real-world cases to assess their development stages.

Findings

Ports show varying maturity levels of digital twin implementation.

Major ports like Singapore, Shanghai, and Rotterdam have advanced digital twin solutions.

The framework can guide design and benchmarking of future port digital twins.

Abstract

Ports are striving for innovative technological solutions to cope with the increasing growth in demand of goods transport, while at the same time improving their environmental footprint. An emerging technology that has the potential to substantially increase the effectiveness of the multifaceted and interconnected port processes is that of digital twins. Innovation-leading ports recognizing the potential of twinning have already started working on it. However, since there is no clear consensus on what a digital twin of a complex system comprises and how it should be designed, deployed digital twin solutions for ports often differ significantly. This article addresses this issue by initially identifying three core aspect underpinning digital twins of complex systems, such as ports, and outlining five successive maturity levels based on these aspects' instantiation. These identified aspects and the derived maturity levels are then used to examine real-world cases by critically evaluating existing digital twinning solutions in the port of Singapore, the Mawan port of Shanghai, and that of Rotterdam. These being three of the world's innovation-leading ports, we naturally find in them most of the identified core aspects to be in line with their twinning implementation, which has reached, in all three, a higher level of maturity. Although, our work on maturity levels and core aspects can provide a guideline for designing and benchmarking future digital twinning solutions for ports, the capacity for innovation via twinning, even in the port domain, is highly contextual with key paragon being the availability of financial and technical resources.