Digital Twins in Port Systems and the contribution of GHG accounting: A literature review

This study explores the existing literature to better understand how Digital Twins (DTs) have been analyzed in the perspective of measuring and reporting the carbon footprint of port systems. The study also analyzes how greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting can contrib-ute to feed the DTs information system regarding the values of emissions from mooring, unmooring and manoeuvring operations at the ship-port interface. Although several studies have explored the implementation of new technologies to improve the technical efficiency of ports and their effects on emissions, and others have analyzed GHG accounting for the measurement and reporting of the latter, it remains uncertain how GHG accounting can be integrated with DTs for predictive analytics of ship-port interface operations. This study conducts a literature review on a dataset of 47 articles from Scopus database and Google Scholar, published from 1990 to 2024. The results highlight that, since 2015, research on DTs in ports has highlighted their key role in reducing the carbon footprint and in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG7. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that analyses, according to a holistic approach, digital sys-tems for virtual representations (DTs) and measurement and reporting systems (GHG ac-counting) for environmental sustainability at the ship-port interface to support public man-agement decisions. This study provides a different perspective of analysis to the decarboni-zation of the port sector, with theoretical and practical implications also in response to the UN 2030 Agenda and its SDGs.