Agent-based simulation of stakeholders relations: an approach to sustainable port and terminal management

Port management is often faced with many vexing problems that are complex and difficult to define. Port policies are in some cases formed from idealized perspectives and market factors, with very little attention or understanding to stakeholder strategies. Stakeholder Relations Management (SRM) provides port management a means to consider stakeholders’ interests in issues related to sustainable port development and management (Notteboom and Winkelmans, 2002). Decision makers in port management have very few means of evaluating the stakeholder relationships and entities involved with port systems. This lack of information often results in ad hoc positions of port managers vis-a-vis stakeholders in the port community. Simulation tools, in particular those using the Multi Agent Based Simulation (MABS) approach, may help to structure and better understand the relationships within complex organizations. The MABS approach has been applied to other areas of policymaking (Downing, 2000) and could be used to evaluate Stakeholder Relations Management (SRM) by modeling and simulating the different stakeholders in a port system. This paper aims to describe an approach (supported with MAS-CommonKADS) enabling decision makers to simulate various port policies and analyze the multitude of “what if” scenarios. The development of a state-of-the-art, MABS of SRM would be the basis for a decision-support system. The results of the simulation rather than guarantee an optimum policy solution, would offer decision makers the ability to view the structure of a port system and the functions that the stakeholders have under various “what if” analyses.

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