Stakeholder mapping and disruption scenarios with application to resilience of a container port
Introduction
Port sustainability has been defined as “business strategies and activities that meet the current and future needs of the enterprise and its stakeholders, while protecting and sustaining human and natural resources” [1], (25). Port authorities are aware of the need to use multidisciplinary strategic planning approaches that are designed to address the complexity and the uncertainty of many challenges that are derived from multiple factors, including those that are technological, economic, social, and political [18]. Port sustainability is directly affected by several economic, social, and environmental factors. Social factors of the sustainability of systems are an important research topic, but the social responsibility and ethical behavior of stakeholders and how these factors impact port sustainability have not been investigated in detail in the literature [17]. A survey published by the European Sea Ports Organization indicates that only 17% of stakeholders and local communities are involved in port development plans [6]. The desired outcomes of these development plans could be disrupted if the participation of a particular stakeholder is delayed or neglected.
Port strategic planning includes the definition of future opportunities and challenges that might affect the operational and financial status of an organization, and it normally addresses the organization's vision, mission, and principles [2]. The author points out that early stakeholder involvement helps to address concerns and needs that are critical to the port planning process. Dooms and Macharis [18] note that more strategic planning approaches have been defined as a result of the increase in port sophistication, and that port strategic planning is a recent research topic which assesses the risks and the opportunities that port authorities may face during their development plans. There are two roles which the port authorities may play: first, being a “comprehensive port,” where the port authority performs almost all the services inside the port; and second, being the “landlord port,” where the port authority is only responsible for planning and the other activities are operated by private companies [22].
Port strategic planning can include three types of planning, depending on the planning time horizon: short-term planning, medium-term planning, and long-term planning [8]. Involving stakeholders and their perspectives and preferences is essential for port strategic planning in order to satisfy the needs of port sustainability and development [18]. Many external and internal stakeholders who have diverse interests and objectives participate in port systems [31]. Projects that have multiple stakeholders are characterized by the diversity of objectives and interests which generate conflicts and disagreements among stakeholders. These contexts are described as coordination failures defined as a lack of consensus related with the tradeoffs and opportunities associated to the use of a certain property [47]. De Langen [16] describes common port stakeholder conflicts including environmental protection, urban development, labor conditions, resident interests, and overall economics. Solving and managing stakeholder conflicts is one of the greatest engineering management challenges today.
A stakeholder could be an individual, group, or organization who may affect or be affected by a decision or modeling outcomes [19]. A port stakeholder is “any individual or group having interest or being affected by the port” [31], (3). Stakeholders have different levels of influence on projects [53], and they have different objectives, interests, and expectations that may or may not support the port development plans. Stakeholder management is an important technique that helps managers to understand the needs and expectations of each stakeholder and to solve conflicts as they occur [53]. Complex systems cannot be analyzed by addressing needs from a single perspective [24], [26], [27], [52]. Methods built based on negotiation and argumentation tested to be sufficient in minimizing the complexity of issues that involve multiple stakeholders [40].
Mansouri et al. [39] note that studying the resilience of the systems of a port to the influence of future disruptive events is crucial, since the port is transferring goods between many national and international locations, and a disruption of operations may cause serious financial losses, and describe four kinds of disruptive events—natural, organizational, technological, and those involving other human factors. Haimes [[25], 498] describes system resilience as “the ability of the system to withstand a major disruption within acceptable degradation parameters and to recover within an acceptable time and composite costs and risks.” The supply chain resilience for the maritime transportation system addresses the ability of the maritime supply system to resist the influence of disruptive events and to maintain normal operation [5]. Gharehgozli et al. [21] develop a port resilience framework that depends on the collaboration of stakeholders to mitigate the impacts of disruptive events. The key result of the framework is that successful resilience strategies depend on the availability of resources and stakeholder management. Understanding how port stakeholders perceive, interact and work with each other is important for improving port resilience [56].
The concept of system resilience has been addressed in a wide range of application domains. Recent system resilience approaches have addressed the influence of scenarios to priorities for systems that involve high uncertainties, multiple stakeholders, and multiple objectives in several fields of application. The applications have considered the prioritization of research and development projects in the energy security domain [29], [34], [41], [58], the biofuel industry domain [9], [10], [13], the climate change domain [30], [36], [61], the infrastructure systems domain [35], and organizational risk and safety [57]. The approaches define priorities as the improvement or development characteristics of many systems and organizations. A priority set can be a set of assets, policies, projects, entities, and others. The above resilience analytics approaches focus on the influence of scenarios to priorities; however, they fail to address the influence of multiple groups of stakeholders to priorities in various research and development projects, particularly when those groups have conflicting interests, strategies, and objectives. Many conflicting economic, environments, social, national, local, and regional interests arise in port operation and development programs [23], [32]. Port resilience depends on several factors, including environmental, economic, social, and political factors [21]. Incorporating the influence of multiple groups of stakeholders to priorities into the available resilience analytics approaches contributes to the risk analysis field by addressing several challenges (e.g., environmental challenges, economic challenges, and social challenges) that matter most to all or part of the groups in various application domains.
This paper develops a framework for resilience analytics that addresses the influences of scenarios and multiple groups of stakeholders to priorities. The framework integrates and extends two existing published approaches: (1) participant mapping [7], [42], [54], and (2) scenario-based preferences in risk analysis [9], [10], [13], [28], [35], [58]. Subsequently, the framework is demonstrated on a long-term port strategic plan to prioritize the planning initiatives under the influence of scenarios and multiple groups of stakeholders.
Section snippets
Methodology
The technical aspects of the resilience analytics framework will be discussed in this section. The framework prioritizes planning initiatives across various criteria sets under the influence of two modes of disruptions. The first mode of disruption is the influence of scenarios to priorities, and the second mode of disruption is the influence of multiple groups of stakeholders to priorities. Strategic planners can use the framework to find the most and least robust initiatives and the most and
Overview
Container ports worldwide are searching for innovative methods of financing infrastructure, maximizing land use, and reducing operational risk through the diversification of cargo types. The Port of Virginia has established a detailed master plan for its large-scale development projects to expand the capacity of the container area, enhance the levels of services and operations, increase system resilience to disruptions, and improve the sustainability of its operations [51]. Stakeholder
Discussion
This paper contributes to ongoing discussions in the Reliability Engineering and System Safety journal, especially to ongoing discussions in scenario preferences modeling and stakeholder analysis [5], [28], [40], [41], [52], [57]. The main contribution of this paper is the conceptualization of a resilience analytics framework that addresses the influences both of scenarios and of multiple groups of stakeholders to priorities. The framework presented in this paper highlights the most/least
Conclusion
For enterprise resilience, this paper presents a framework that addresses the influences of two modes of disruptions; the influences of scenarios and multiple groups of stakeholders to priorities. The framework integrates two existing approaches. The first approach is a stakeholder analysis approach called stakeholders mapping [7], [42], [54], and the second approach is a risk analysis approach called scenario-based preferences modeling [9], [10], [13], [28], [58]. The innovation of this
Acknowledgments
This effort was supported in part by the National Science Foundation with grant 1541165 “CRISP Type 2: Collaborative Research: Resilience Analytics: A Data-Driven Approach for Enhanced Interdependent Network Resilience,” the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Logistics Systems, The Port of Virginia, and the Virginia Department of Transportation.
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