A Port Masterplan is a document that defines how ports intend to develop in the future. The process of Port Planning and the development of the Port Masterplan is a process that commences well before the port development starts, evolves over time, and expands as an existing facility grows and changes to meet demand. With most of the world’s port infrastructure being in highly populated areas, and with the increase in the number and complexity of stakeholders, port master planning in all its forms is going to become a more specialised and valued skill.
Techniques, standards, and guidelines available to generate a Port Masterplan are many and varied. and in some cases conflicting. Whilst there is an attraction to follow industry standards and tailor the Port Masterplan to conform with local regulations and business needs, this does not always guarantee success of the Port Masterplan objectives. Where there is little or conflicting guidance that sufficiently covers all parties involved in Port Masterplanning, the process of developing the ports masterplan exercise quickly becomes a tangled web of stakeholders with widely different interests and objectives. Given the above backdrop, there is a tendency to develop and adopt various guidelines or none, generating a patchwork of confusing documentation with endless revisions and vague outcomes.
There is therefore an opportunity for organizations to realise that a Port Masterplan is not just a rigid blueprint document to guide the future development and be kept in bookshelves. The port masterplan must be seen as a skeleton framework for different stages of the port operation along the years enabling and encouraging flexibility and agility to react to market, environmental and new technologies changing conditions, both as risks and opportunities.
The aim of this paper is to present a review of most common guidelines and standards for Port Masterplan preparation. The objectives involve a critical analysis of key documents in a succinct form where common parameters are compared against each other and differences are summarised. A selection of the world’s major Port Masterplans will be discussed in the context of the above review.
This significance of this paper is that the analytical review of available techniques, standards, and guidelines in the ports industry applied to case studies allowed an understand the successfulness of these guidelines and identify areas where Port Masterplan guidelines are required to improve.