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A sudden rise in wind speed. A crane slows down. A pilot boat radios that manoeuvring is becoming risky. Inside the control tower, screens flash warnings while phones begin to ring in parallel. Someone reaches for a thick emergency manual to confirm which protocol should apply. Anyone working in a port knows this scene well: decisions must be made quickly, yet information is scattered, terminology differs from one team to the next and coordination depends on long experience and rapid-fire calls.
This becomes even more critical in the context of climate change. Latest assessments show that climate-related disruptions already cause billions of dollars in losses across global shipping and port infrastructure every year. Ports cannot stop storms, heatwaves or flooding, but they can improve the speed and consistency of their response. And this is where a major shift is beginning: ports are recognising that resilience depends on their ability to automate the core steps of emergency procedures.
Automation promises faster decisions, clearer communication and fewer blind spots during crises. Yet the main challenge is not technology. It is the fragmentation of procedures, data structures and communication practices across the port ecosystem. Despite the availability of sensors, dashboards and digital twins, most emergency processes still hinge on manual coordination because every organisation follows its own rules and uses its own language.
Before a port can automate, it must simplify. And before it can simplify, it must find a way to express emergencies in a form that every actor can understand.
Ports are among the most interconnected operational environments in the world. Terminal operators, pilots, tug services, mooring teams, VTS officers, harbour masters, logistics companies, rail and road operators, customs, environmental agencies and local authorities all intervene during an emergency. Each actor plays a legitimate role, yet each operates with different procedures, thresholds and reporting requirements.
This diversity reflects local histories and governance structures, but it also creates operational friction. Events may be detected late because thresholds differ. Terminology may not match across organisations. Two terminals located only a few hundred metres apart may escalate the same situation in completely different ways. Even classifying an incident can take valuable minutes because it requires interpretation across multiple systems.
In practice, emergency management becomes a chain of individual decisions linked through calls, radios and emails. People make it work, but the process remains fragile and impossible to automate consistently.
Automation is not achieved by installing a new tool. It requires a shared structure behind how decisions are made. Today, several barriers make this difficult.
Emergency procedures are deeply customised. Manuals grow over years, accumulating asset-specific rules, local reporting obligations, organisational charts and legacy practices. What makes perfect sense locally becomes incompatible when scaled.
Data is not harmonised. Different names for the same event, different codes for assets, different classifications for operational status all make automated exchange unreliable.
Most procedures are still expressed in static documents such as PDFs or printed binders. These are essential for compliance but difficult to translate into machine logic.
Finally, systems across the port community are rarely interoperable. Terminals, pilots, port authorities and tugs may all use sophisticated systems, yet these systems cannot easily communicate without costly, fragile interfaces.
Taken together, these barriers make highly detailed, universal automation models unrealistic. The path forward lies not in adding more detail, but in stripping the process back to its essential, shared components.
Our work at SAFARI begins from a simple observation: despite all their differences, ports follow almost the same underlying logic during emergencies. A threat is detected. Its severity is assessed. A decision is made to activate a response. Relevant actors are alerted and coordinated actions follow until the situation stabilises.
The key is not to standardise everything, but to standardise only the elements that are common to all ports. A minimal set of semantic components can be identified that every port can express:
· the type of event
· the severity level
· the affected zone or asset
· the recommended category of action
These few elements form a shared backbone that supports automation without erasing local practices. Each organisation can retain its own thresholds, internal procedures and operational constraints, as long as it can translate key information into this simplified structure. This is the essence of the approach: accept diversity but align the core logic so that automation becomes feasible everywhere.
This minimal-data-input approach is not a shortcut. It is a realistic response to the fact that most ports cannot provide the high-resolution, fully harmonised data required by complex automation models. Simplification is what makes automation achievable.
SAFARI builds on existing semantic standards that are already shaping port digitalisation.
TIC4.0, the Terminal Industry Committee initiative 4.0, has defined a shared data language for terminal operations, ensuring that equipment states, operational events and activity messages can be exchanged consistently across vendors and systems. This kind of semantic alignment is essential before any automation can scale.
In parallel, the PAS 4000 specification, developed with the British Standards Institution, provides a structured, machine-readable way of expressing cargo-handling processes. It formalises workflows, messages and operational states so that they can be integrated into digital architectures.
By aligning its emergency-process model with TIC4.0 and PAS 4000, SAFARI ensures compatibility with existing data architectures and facilitates integration into decision-support tools and, eventually, digital twins. For climate resilience, this is essential: during extreme events, clear, standardised information is just as critical as physical infrastructure.
Once emergencies can be described using a shared structure, several tangible benefits appear.
Activation becomes faster. When a port transmits only three elements - event type, severity and affected area - an automated system can classify the situation, trigger alerts and recommend actions immediately. No interpretation is needed.
Coordination becomes smoother. When every organisation receives the same message expressed the same way, delays shrink and contradictory decisions become less likely.
Integration becomes easier. Decision-support tools and digital twins rely on structured data. A lightweight semantic model allows them to represent operational states, evaluate options and record actions consistently across actors.
Crucially, none of this requires full automation of every detail in the emergency manual. Even partial automation, grounded in simplification, can produce significant gains.
Many ports professionals associate standardisation with bureaucracy. In emergency management, the opposite is true. Clear, simplified standards remove ambiguity when clarity matters most. A compact model based on shared definitions eliminates unnecessary conversations, shortens message exchanges and lets teams focus on what is happening rather than how to describe it. Far from constraining expertise, simplification enables it. Industries such as aviation and emergency medicine have long understood that well-designed standards reduce cognitive load and improve response. Ports face similar pressures and can benefit in the same way.
The aim is not to impose heavy frameworks but to start small, define only what is essential, demonstrate value quickly and then scale what works. Well-designed standards cut through operational friction, speed up decision making and create the foundation that makes automation possible. In emergencies, simplicity is not a compromise. It is a strength.
Resilience frameworks distinguish several phases, from anticipation to response, adaptation and recovery. A simplified, standardised emergency process strengthens all of them. Detection becomes more reliable because events are described consistently. Response accelerates because decision chains are clearer. Recovery is smoother because actions are documented in a comparable way. Learning improves because every incident contributes to a structured knowledge base.
Most importantly, this foundation prepares ports for more advanced digital tools. No predictive model, digital twin or AI-driven system can function effectively without structured input data. In this sense, simplification is not an optional preparatory step. It is the prerequisite for meaningful automation.
Conclusion: A Small Standard with a Big Impact on Port Resilience
Emergency automation in ports does not begin with dashboards or sensors. It begins with clarity. By agreeing on a minimal set of shared concepts, ports can accelerate decisions, improve coordination and strengthen their resilience in the face of increasingly frequent extreme events.
In a resilient port, the right information reaches the right people at the right moment. Simplification is how we get there.
This work is part of WP5 of the SAFARI project. The preliminary findings presented here are detailed in Deliverable D5.10, which will soon be made publicly available.
