Governing Cross-Infrastructure Digital Resilience in European Ports: A Feasibility Study in the Port of Rotterdam

Abstract

Nowadays, modern infrastructure systems are becoming more connected, more advanced, more digital, and more exposed to disruption. Events such as climate change, extreme weather, cyberattacks, geopolitical instability, energy stress, supply-chain shocks, and technological dependence increasingly show how fragile essential systems can become when one failure moves across different sectors. European ports are located at the center of this fragility. More specifically, they are not only defined as maritime gateways, but as dense operational environments where sectors of logistics, energy, transport, water, ICT systems, industrial activity, cyber-security arrangements, and public crisis management all depend on each other. In such a setting, port resilience now becomes a cross-infrastructure governance problem.
This thesis therefore examines this problem through the case of the Port of Rotterdam. As Europe’s largest seaport and a strategic node for trade, energy, industry, and hinterland logistics, Rotterdam provides a highly relevant case for studying how cross-infrastructure disruption management is organized in practice. This research asks how existing disruption-management practices, information flows, and governance arrangements in and around the Port of Rotterdam shape the feasibility and potential added value of a cross-infrastructure digital resilience platform.
The study uses the “European Union Infrastructure Digital Resilience Platform (EU-IDRP)” as a conceptual object of analysis. EU-IDRP is a researcher-developed, non-operational platform concept. It was conceived as a federated coordination platform through which infrastructure actors could retain control over their own systems while sharing selected disruption-relevant information for dependency mapping, scenario analysis, and human-in-the-loop decision support.
The research combines literature reviews with ten semi-structured expert interviews involving different actors from infrastructure operation, public crisis management, port innovation, cyber resilience, terminal operations, digital modelling, and interoperability. Through this qualitative approach, the thesis then explores how different actors understand cascading disruptions, how information is currently shared, what coordination gaps exist, and under which governance conditions a shared digital platform could be trusted, used, and embedded.
The research findings show that a cross-infrastructure digital resilience platform could be in principle valuable, but its feasibility is presented as conditional. That is, existing systems and coordination practices already support parts of disruption management, yet they mainly produce partial visibility leaving aside shared system-level awareness. The research also identifies a grey space between routine operational incidents and formal crisis escalation, where cross-infrastructure coordination may already be needed before a formal crisis structure is activated. In this study, interoperability is presented as a socio-technical issue involving shared meanings, routines, responsibilities, legal arrangements, and operational fit. Finally, as it emerged from the analysis, the most useful information for resilience is also often the one that is the most sensitive to share.
The thesis concludes that the added value of a platform like EU-IDRP would especially lie in governed shared situational awareness and cross-infrastructure sense-making. The findings suggest that such a platform would most plausibly operate as a federated, role-based, and institutionally embedded coordination layer. Its purpose should therefore be to support existing responsibilities, provide controlled visibility, reduce coordination burden, and help actors recognize potential cascading effects earlier. The study contributes to port-resilience and critical-infrastructure governance literature by shifting attention from interdependence as an actual problem to governed coordination as a condition for resilience.