Port Planning and Development
Port planning in its context
Three different types of port planning by port authorities can be distinguished:
Medium-term planning involves both financial and strategic planning, often informed through business plans. Strategic plans, which are generally prepared every three to five years, aim to allocate port resources to different activities and meet specific financial and marketing objectives.
Short-term planning involves the current allocation of port resources and services. Within short-term planning, a distinction can be made between operational and tactical planning. The latter refers to a planning horizon of one to three years.
he result is a physical plan for the future development of port infrastructure and other capabilities, capabilities with a planning horizon of ten to 30 years.
Strategic port planning in a changing market environment
Ports are affected by greater uncertainties and risks than ever before. These trends and the expanding role of the private sector in port activities have forced ports to become more market oriented and to review their strategic planning process. This change can be illustrated by applying the Corporate Strategy Matrix to the port sector. The Port Strategy Matrix identifies four basic strategies that ports can adopt.
The channels for implementing a strategy are located in a market or non-market environment. In the first context, market forces prevail, while in the second, ports exercise strategic behavior vis-à-vis the government and pressure groups.
By combining nature and channel elements, the Port Strategy Matrix is constructed and four port strategy options are identified. Port strategies not based on efficiency aim to achieve an 'artificial' advantage in the form of refuge or protection against rival ports. The Russian port system during the Soviet times was located in quadrant 4. The Soviet government had a great impact on the economy through state-owned factories and enterprises and the development of rather rigid multi-year plans that affected all economic activities. Given the focus on full employment, port efficiency and overall labor productivity in ports were generally low.
As a result of the changes in the market environment, an increasing number of ports are forced to seek a position in quadrant 1, which has a great impact on traditional port strategic planning.
Approaches to the port planning process
Three basic approaches can be distinguished for structuring the port planning process:
Top-down planning. The government or port authority sets the strategic intent and prepares the plan. The main problem associated with this approach is that the port industry may feel neglected while having a better view of the port's resources and capabilities and possessing more information about the external environment.
Bottom-up planning. The government or port authority fully uses these inputs to create a strategic plan without critically evaluating the opinions and expectations of the port community. However, such an approach could be severely influenced by local rationality and opportunism.
Goals down - planning plans up. The port government or authority sets the strategic intent and asks the wider port community to propose ideas and plans that meet this intent. In most cases, the government or port authority will seek to achieve a structured confrontation by institutionalizing the strategic port planning process.
Data Collection in Port Planning
The strategic planning process requires comprehensive data on the port's internal resources and capabilities and the external competitive environment. When collecting the necessary data, a port must take into account not only the need to search for quantitative data but also the need for valuable qualitative elements. A one-sided focus on quantitative data can lead to a narrow-minded analysis of the past and current situation with too much emphasis on marginal developments. For example, a database can track fluctuations in world steel trade, but it is more important for a port to know the general trend and why this trend exists, including qualitative elements of developments.
Also, some resources, such as people-based skills, cannot be found in a port database. For internal assessment of resources and capabilities, a port may obtain information from port management. Therefore, the people who know the most about the port may also be the people whose opinions are likely to be biased. In this sense, customer and competitor surveys can provide additional and less biased information on the strengths and weaknesses of the port in question.
For the external assessment of the competitive environment, a port can draw on a multitude of official statistics, press reports and sectoral studies. If data models are used to assess the internal and external environment of a port, the analyst must take into account the assumptions that form the basis of the analysis.
Evaluation of Port Infrastructure Projects
Traffic Forecast as part of Port Planning and Development
Rationale for traffic forecast
Master plans and port infrastructure projects usually require long-term forecasts. Since the design and construction of a port infrastructure can take up to five years or more, and the infrastructure could be available for the next 50 to 100 years, public decision-makers and port authorities are requested to present long-term traffic forecasts. And the existing and expected balance between demand and port capacity. In a port planning context, the port authority has to define the long-term direction of port development, including, among other things, defining the future size of the port, the portfolio of commodities to be served, and related costs.
The port authority has to plan its own investments according to the expectations and forecasts of the demand, but also in a complementary way with the investments foreseen by the individual private actors in their business plans.
forecast methods
The port environment presents a high level of uncertainty. Freight flows show variability and seasonality caused by economic cycles, seasonal fluctuations and weather variations, and economic, social, political, nature-related or health shocks and crises. The demand for port services is also affected by the evolutionary trajectories of other infrastructure connected to the port. Scholars also distinguish between parametric forecast models, as assuming a model structure that can be described through well-defined mathematical expressions, and non-parametric, which are those that are not based on any defined functional form of the variables.
The most commonly used are the moving average and exponential smoothing, the ARIMA approach, and the consideration or exclusion of seasonality, as well as additional implementations and generalizations. Among the techniques, expert opinions are used in the Delphi Method, Panel Consensus Forecast and Visionary Forecast. The market research forecast and historical analogy forecast are based on expert opinion, general trends and economic knowledge. In general, qualitative methods are not reliable and precise, but they are useful for drawing approximate scenarios in contexts of high variability.
Challenges and pitfalls in traffic forecasting
Lack of know how. The foresight exercise requires a solid understanding of the port ecosystem and the key variables that trigger change, as well as significant technical capacity in terms of data collection and analysis, and a good dose of caution to avoid bias. While port authorities often present long-term traffic forecasts in the context of port master plans or port projects, they may not always have the skills, knowledge and resources to participate in traffic forecasts.
The choice and application of appropriate forecasting methods, the interpretation of forecast results, and the communication of traffic forecasts with interested parties are also challenges.
Complexity _ Traffic forecasts are very complex exercises, as they must capture the uncertainties and interdependencies between factors that may influence future traffic flows.
Varios puertos, en particular los puertos medianos y pequeños, continúan operando de manera informal o fragmentada. El desarrollo en estos puertos a menudo carece de una columna vertebral común, lo que resulta en la evaluación de oportunidades ad-hoc o presión política o de mercado.
Evaluation methods
Procedures and guidelines
The latter methods are typically implemented to assess effects that one cannot or does not express in monetary values. The economic impact study or economic effects analysis can also be used. In some cases, input-output analyses, which form the basis of economic impact studies, are used to assess indirect economic effects. This increased focus on methodologies to estimate the effects of port infrastructure projects has led to a multiplication of the type of effects considered in an SCBA.
The direct and external effects of the project that are commonly considered in an SCBA relate to construction costs, maintenance and administration costs, different types of logistics and transportation benefits, and the impact of the project on mobility and connectivity. The picture is less clear for some other external effects, such as noise pollution, air pollution, and visual intrusion. In quite a few countries, these latter effects are included in SCBA and expressed in monetary values using a suite of valuation techniques. In other cases, separate quantitative or qualitative analyzes are used to assess these effects without monetary valuation.
These considerations are also reflected in the appraisal and evaluation procedures applicable to port infrastructure projects. Governments have developed guidelines and tools to encourage a more comprehensive, long-term and analytically sound approach to the valuation and evaluation of port infrastructure projects. Decision-making frameworks for large infrastructure projects, such as large port developments, are often complex in terms of procedural aspects and the assessment and evaluation tools used. The quality of the project evaluation results can be guaranteed.
The time factor plays an important role in the evaluation of any infrastructure project. Guidelines on project evaluation can usually contain clear stipulations on the time to complete project evaluation studies. Long time series on flows are at the heart of any port infrastructure assessment, but the uncertainty of long-term developments becomes more apparent. Therefore, the construction of scenarios and risk analysis have gained importance when considering the evaluation of port infrastructure.
Iterations in a project appraisal procedure often involve a stepwise approach. The detail and precision of the data provided increases as the evaluation progresses from the initial steps of identifying and evaluating project alternatives to the final steps of the procedure. Currently, a large part of the financial and human resources linked to a project appraisal procedure is linked to consultation with and between stakeholders. At the assessment level, there is a greater emphasis on assessing the differential impacts of port projects on various stakeholders, when they are likely to be significant.
In other words, project evaluation techniques are aimed at making the distribution of costs and benefits among the relevant groups/actors of society more transparent. Port authorities, government departments and agencies are increasingly encouraged to establish formal evaluation or assessment units and formalize access to internal and external auditors. There is a growing tendency to include a systematic optimism bias in the evaluation of projects. Optimism management is slowly being internalized into the evaluation process, for example, through an explicit adjustment procedure to correct for systematic optimism.
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