Port competition modeling including maritime, port, and hinterland characteristics

Container transport has grown very rapidly worldwide and in the coming decades also a substantial, above average, growth is foreseen in this type of freight transport. Container transport is also one of the least captive cargo types, and ports and governments are responding to this with large investments to improve the market share of their port in this competitive market. The purpose of this paper is to present a new port forecasting approach that models port competition explicitly. The model follows a logistic chain approach and is designed to calculate the impacts of a wide range of policy measures (e.g. infrastructure, pricing) in the port itself, its maritime access and its hinterland connections. The functioning of the model is demonstrated for the ports of Antwerp, Rotterdam, Bremen and Hamburg.