Evaluating the impact of smart technologies on harbor's logistics via BPMN modeling and simulation

A Smart Information and Communication Technology (S-ICT) is an ICT enabling a synchronized interplay of different key factors, aligning infrastructures, consumers, and governmental policymaking needs. In the harbor's logistics context, S-ICT has been driving a multi-year wave of growth. Although there is a standalone value in the technological innovation of a task, what is ultimately important is to measure the overall value of a new S-ICT over a combined coordination of tasks and resources, for a number of representative consumer-driven cases. Not surprisingly, a local improvement could even result in an increased global inefficiency along the entire flow of activities. Hence, the impact of a new smart technology is unknown without quantitative analysis methods on the end-to-end process. In this paper, we propose an approach based on the modeling and simulation of harbor's organizational process in terms of a workflow model. The proposed approach is founded on the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard, and it is particularly useful to perform what-if analysis or to support an efficient integration design. In this study, we also show a practical application of the approach through a real-world analysis on a marine container terminal of the Port of Leghorn (Italy).