Risk Management of Port Operations: a Systematic Literature Review and Future Directions

With the continuous development of world economy, the trade and connection between countries are getting closer, in which ports are playing an increasingly important role. However, due to the inherent complexity of port operational environment, ports are exposed to various types of hazards and more likely to encounter risks with high frequency and serious consequences. Therefore, proper and effective risk management of ports is particularly essential and necessary. In this research, literature from three aspects including risk assessment of port operations and service, safety management of dangerous goods, and port supply chain risk management was collected and investigated, in order to put forward the future research direction related to the risk management of port operations. The research results show that, firstly, most of the current research mainly focuses on the operational risk of traditional ports and a lot of relevant achievements have been seen. However, few scholars have studied the risk issues of smart ports which are believed to be the trend of future with the rapid development and application of high and new technologies. Thus, it is suggested that more attention should be shifted to the identification and assessment of operational risks of smart ports considering their characteristics. Secondly, although the risk evaluation systems of port operational safety have been established and widely studied, more efforts are still needed in terms of the suitability and effectiveness of the proposed indicators, especially when dangerous goods are involved. Thirdly, risk management of port supply chain is another popular topic, in which, one of the main difficulties lies on the collection of risk related statistics data due to the fact that port supply chain systems are usually huge and complex. It is inevitably that the evaluation results will lack objectivity to some extent. Therefore, it calls for more research on the risk assessment of port supply chains in a quantitative manner. In addition, resilience, as an emerging concept in the transportation field, will provide a new angle on the risk management of port supply chains.