Maritime transport in the European Union has increased in the last years, triggering congestion in many of the most important sea and river ports. A lot of works have highlighted how the connection between these ports and dry ports can contribute to reducing port congestion and emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs). This work aims to improve the knowledge about the functionalities of Terminal Operating Systems (TOSs) managing container terminals of sea, river, and dry ports, with the aim of improving their performance and contributing to reducing congestion and GHG emissions to achieve a higher sustainability. The contribution and novelty of this paper in the field of container-terminals logistics research is the use of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to identify and hierarchize TOS functionalities. The robustness of the model was checked by applying a sensitivity analysis. One hundred and seven functionalities were grouped into six main clusters: Warehouse, Maritime Operations, Gate, Master Data, Communications, and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) Dashboard. The results show that time tracking of vessels, space optimization, development of loading and unloading lists, and optimization of container locations are the most important functionalities of a TOS. This work is addressed to developers, sellers, managers, and users of TOSs and researchers working on container-terminal performance.

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Market acceptance of new digitalization technologies is low. To help to address this shortcoming, the following paper defines a quantitative decision-making methodology for the exante evaluation of the market acceptance of new digitalization solutions in the initial stages of design and development. The proposed decision-making methodology includes a first evaluation, using Volere methodology, for the quantification of how useful the new digitalization solution is for the end users, and a second method, the calculation of the net present value (NPV) based on potential benefits in terms of costs and intangible benefits of the new tool. A new tool for the management of freight transport was used as a case study. The usefulness of a new information technology tool was assessed in six different companies. It was designed to help developers and decision makers in information and communication technology (ICT) product development, and company managers in the evaluation of technical solutions that might better satisfy their needs. Further studies could measure the power of this methodology by comparing the implementation levels of two different prototypes designed for the same function and with different Volere and NPV scorings.