Discrete-Event Simulation and Data Envelopment Analysis in Port

Efﬁciency Evaluation: A Bibliometric Analysis and Mapping of

Combined Databases

Noor Haﬁzah Zainal Aznam

1,2

and Noor Saifurina Nana Khurizan

School of Mathematical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 USM Penang, Malaysia

Mathematical Sciences Studies, College of Computing, Informatics and Media, Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM)

Kedah Branch, Sungai Petani Campus, 08400 Merbok Kedah, Malaysia

ﬁ ﬁ

Keywords:

Discrete Event Simulation, Data Envelopment Analysis, Port Efﬁciency Evaluation.

Abstract:

This paper provides a bibliometric review and network analysis merging Scopus and Web of Science (WoS)

databases on the port-related studies of discrete-event simulation (DES) or/and data envelopment analysis

(DEA). 172 studies were published in 87 academic journals and authored by 432 scholars. The bibliograph-

ical data was examined with the R software Bibliometrix tool. Citation analysis metrics identiﬁed the most

productive and inﬂuential articles, the top journals, the most productive and impactful authors, most rele-

vant institutions, as well as the comparison of local citation score of articles published in Scopus and WoS

databases. At the end of the analysis phase, the co-occurrence of inﬂuential keywords for Scopus, and WoS

databases, and the collaboration networks of the authors, institutions, and countries are provided.

1 INTRODUCTION

After nearly three decades, there has been continu-

ous and rapid growth in interdisciplinary interest in

port studies. The port’s long-term viability has be-

come a global concern due to its importance in world

trade, which drives the country’s economy. Further-

more, the increased managerial interest in optimis-

ing the port performance and efﬁciency necessitates

sustained efforts and a more result-oriented approach.

The simulation and optimisation approach can be an

interesting hybrid method to be implemented in port-

related studies. It ensures the results to be more un-

derstandable through the mimicking process and pro-

vides the best decision by maximising or minimising

the desired variables. These two methods comple-

ment each other because simulation is a difﬁcult pro-

cess for obtaining high-quality solutions, while op-

timisation can yield high-quality analytical solutions

(Lee, 2017). Enormous advances in computational

power encourage the development of techniques that

integrated both methods (Figueira and Almada-Lobo,

2014).

Simulation has the ability to transcend the mathe-

matical limitations of optimisation approaches. The

simulation produces computer-generated techniques

that are easier to comprehend and aid decision-makers

in their daily decisionmaking processes (Carten

ı and

Luca, 2012). It has been found in several port-related

research, including operations (Petering, 2015; Bal-

lis et al., 1997), planning and evaluation (Moon and

Woo, 2014; Longo et al., 2015), and integration with

optimisation models (Zeng et al., 2015; Sislioglu

et al., 2019). In port-related studies, simulation is

very helpful in assisting the operational sector in al-

locating facilities, proposing congested port alterna-

tives, and enhancing port performance.

DEA, on the other hand, was made known by

Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes (Charnes et al., 1978)

(referred to CCR) in 1978 as a new alternative to

measure efﬁciency. Since then, extensions of DEA

were developed actively to address the shortcomings

of the previous approach and has been widely ap-

plied in port studies. According to Ensslin et al.

(Ensslin et al., 2018), DEA is the most frequently

used performance evaluation technique for seaport.

uner (G

uner, 2018) used DEA to estimate the port

efﬁciency by incorporating expert opinions, while

Mustafa et al. (Mustafa et al., 2021) analysed the

technical efﬁciency of less examined by the Middle

East and South Asian ports. A current topic on envi-

ronmental efﬁciency has initiated a study conducted

by Castell

o-Taliani et al. (Castell

o-Taliani et al.,

Aznam, N. and Khurizan, N.

Discrete-Event Simulation and Data Envelopment Analysis in Port Efﬁciency Evaluation: A Bibliometric Analysis and Mapping of Combined Databases.

DOI: 10.5220/0012444300003848

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Advanced Information Scientiﬁc Development (ICAISD 2023), pages 84-95

ISBN: 978-989-758-678-1

2021) to evaluate environmental efﬁciency. The au-

thors revealed that environmental expenditures and

investments could be linked to economic and opera-

tional efﬁciency. Meanwhile, Huang et al. (Huang

et al., 2020) applied three stage DEA to investigate

the pollutant emissions effects on port efﬁciency in a

port development strategy.

Though few studies exist to assess the port per-

formance using the simulation approach and optimi-

sation method, most port-related studies focused on

the method separately. The hybrid approach is unnew

in the healthcare sector. For a long time, it has been

applied in healthcare management studies in terms of

ranking (Rabbani et al., 2016), scheduling (Aslani and

Zhang, 2014), allocation (Yusoff et al., 2018; Yusoff

et al., 2018; Yazdanparast et al., 2018) and optimising

resources (Aminuddin et al., 2016; Al-Refaie et al.,

2014). However, limited studies exist that hybridise

these two methods in assessing port efﬁciency. The

study of Sislioglu et al. (Sislioglu et al., 2019) re-

vealed that the application of DES helps facilitates the

selection of inputs for subsequent analysis of DEA.

Pjevcevi c et al. (Pjevcevic et al., 2017) used the

simulated data obtained from the DES on container

handling processes to measure the efﬁciency using

CCR DEA. Min and Park (Min and Park, 2008) used

the simulation to estimate the terminal capacity data

by mimicking the ships’ duration of occupancy at

berth and adopted window DEA to evaluate time se-

ries trends of efﬁciency ratings. Meanwhile, Pjevcevi

c et al. (D. B. Pjevcevic, 2013) conducted a study

in which simulation was used to provide the scenar-

ios to assess the efﬁciency of dry bulk cargo handling

using DEA. To the knowledge of the researcher’ expe-

rience, no study of bibliometric approaches for docu-

menting published research on port efﬁciency that re-

views simulation or/and DEA use is accessible. Fur-

thermore, the results obtained from these methods in

Bibliometrix analysis showed only a 9.25% annual

growth.

Bibliometrics is a fundamental methodology of

analysing research articles that overview academic

journals, academicians/scholars, research institutions,

and countries in the speciﬁc ﬁeld (Merig

o and Yang,

2017). Since many of bibliometric studies have com-

pared the databases for the analysis, this paper in-

tends to merge the databases and ﬁnd the best of the

top ten from the analysis. A wide range of data can

be found in the Scopus and WoS databases. While

WoS gives a considerably larger range of years, Sco-

pus offers a better number of journals and an intelli-

gent interface (Goodman and Deis, 2007). Gavel and

Iselid (Gavel and Iselid, 2008) estimated that WoS

comprises 54% of the journal titles covered by Sco-

pus and that Scopus covers 84% of the titles of WoS.

It indicates that Scopus offers more publishing cov-

erage as well. Echchakoui (Echchakoui, 2020) con-

tended that both databases are crucial, and it is es-

sential to use both since one completes the other in

order to conduct adequate bibliometric studies. These

research ﬁndings have a number of academic and in-

dustry consequences. This provides a comprehensive

overview of the research topic, introducing academics

and practitioners to major studies, authors, universi-

ties, concepts, and methodologies fascinated by hy-

bridising DEA and simulation research in port efﬁ-

ciency measurement. Integrating simulation in DEA

research could develop a solid framework for imple-

menting a strategised procedure in the operational do-

main. Port operators and management can use the de-

ﬁned concepts and methods to optimise resources us-

age and to plan ahead of the investment for new tech-

nologies and expansion of port capacity in improving

the port efﬁciency.

The below is the format of the study’s next por-

tion. The data sources and procedures are described

in Section 2, while the ﬁndings and outcomes of the

bibliometric study are presented in Section 3 as ta-

bles, graphs, and networks. Section 4 discusses the

ﬁndings as well as the global trend in port efﬁciency

evaluation, and the ﬁnal section concludes with con-

clusions and limits.

2 DATA SOURCES AND

METHODS

Bibliometric analysis is a well-liked and exact-

ing technique for investigating and analysing vast

amounts of scientiﬁc data. The data sources for

this study were collected from the Scopus and WoS

databases on October 5, 2022. Scopus and WoS are

two ever-updated databases for new articles, leading

to slightly different results when the search process

is performed on a different date. Scopus is one of

the most reliable and established databases for ab-

stract and citation since 2004, meanwhile, WoS is the

world’s most trusted publisher-independent global ci-

tation database and most powerful research engine for

publication and citation networks. Most importantly,

both databases were chosen as search engines because

both are the most widely accepted and frequently used

databases for the analyses of scientiﬁc publications

(Nunen et al., 2018). Papers on applications related to

port studies using DEA or / and DES were searched

and retrieved from these databases. This bibliometric

analysis uses a four-stage methodology to evaluate the

research subjects, identify the most inﬂuential stud-

Discrete-Event Simulation and Data Envelopment Analysis in Port Efﬁciency Evaluation: A Bibliometric Analysis and Mapping of

Combined Databases

ies, and offer recommendations for future studies in

the ﬁeld. Figure 1 shows the four stages of obtaining

data from the Scopus and WoS databases to initiate

the data analysis.

2.1 Determine Search Keywords and

Initial Search Results

The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Re-

views and Meta-Analyses (Page et al., 2021)

(PRISMA) approach adopted to screen the articles

for the whole process. In the ﬁrst step, articles in

the Scopus database were determined using the title,

abstract, and keywords search. As opposed to prior

works, the subject search in WoS is employed and

combined with Scopus to supplement the search in

the Scopus database. Topic search of WoS includes

the articles based on the searched keywords in the

title, abstract, author keywords, and Keywords Plus.

Essentially, the same keyword search strategy was

used in Scopus to ensure that the articles searched

were within the scope and that the quality of the way

of searching was the same for both databases. Key-

words of ”terminal efﬁcienc*” OR ”port efﬁcienc*”

OR ”seaport efﬁcienc*” OR ”yard crane*” OR ”quay

crane*” OR ”truck turnaround time*” OR ”vessel

turnaround time*” OR ”container handling” used in

both databases resulted in 2843 and 1635 records in

Scopus and WoS, respectively. Since this study fo-

cused on discrete event simulation or/and data en-

velopment analysis, the next step is using these two

keywords in search within the results tab. By search-

ing this way, Scopus ﬁltered the records down to 429,

while WoS narrowed the records down to 170. Then,

these articles were retrieved for further ﬁltration.

Figure 1: Diagram of extracting data from Scopus and WoS

databases.

2.2 Reﬁnement of Search Results

Records are re-ﬁltered by only allowing publication

types in the form of articles and must be in English.

Thus, there are now 286 articles in Scopus that have

been published, compared to 137 in WoS. Each pub-

lication from Scopus and WoS includes a plethora of

information, including the publishing year, authors,

afﬁliation of the authors, title, abstract, source of pub-

lications, subject categories, and references, which to-

gether form the fundamental components of the bib-

liometric analysis. The vital article data was retrieved

from the databases; it is stored in xlsx format for WoS

and csv format for Scopus. Basic details including the

authors’ names, article titles, publication years, doi

numbers, abstracts, and keywords were required for

ﬁltration as part of the search results.

2.3 Compile Statistical Data

Each article was manually checked to determine

whether the scope of studies is within the port-related

either by using DES or DEA. The end result was that

124 irrelevant articles were eliminated from Scopus,

leaving only 162 articles, while 19 irrelevant articles

were removed from WoS, leaving just 118 articles.

This process avoids any out-of-scope studies and im-

proves the quality of data. Again, the ﬁltered articles

were retrieved from each database, but this time, the

full records offered by Scopus and WoS were chosen

to be used in the subsequent data analysis. One hun-

dred sixty-two and one hundred eighteen documents

included and retrieved once again from the Scopus

and WoS databases, respectively but now in differ-

ent formats viz BibTex. Using the R command, both

databases were converted into xlsx format. Following

that, all of the articles in both databases were com-

bined, and all duplicate articles were instantly deleted.

105 duplicate publications were eliminated, bringing

the total down to 175 records. The records were saved

using a single xlsx ﬁle. However, the doi number is

used to manually verify for duplication. There are

consequently three additional duplications that must

be eliminated.

2.4 Data Analysis

The ﬁnal data consists of only 172 records. Bib-

liometrix package in R remove all the duplications

from WoS, and Scopus was made as reference data.

A total of 108 papers are present in both databases,

featuring 10 additional documents from the WoS

database and 54 additional studies from the Sco-

pus database. We can deduce that WoS only covers

ICAISD 2023 - International Conference on Advanced Information Scientiﬁc Development

66.67% of the articles in Scopus while Scopus covers

91.53% of the articles in WoS. Biblioshiny package

in R software was used to run the data for the anal-

ysis. The raw data was uploaded into Biblioshiny in

xlsx format before the analysis of 172 documents pro-

ceeded. This study performed the bibliometric analy-

sis using output analysis, co-occurrence analysis, and

network visualization on two methods, DEA and/or

DES that have been applied in assessing the efﬁciency

of the seaport.

3 BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS

AND FINDINGS

This section describes the publications on port perfor-

mance based on DEA or/and DES without categoris-

ing them into different clusters. Most of the articles

used either DEA or DES in their studies, while only

a single study combined both methods. The details of

the top ten for each category will be discussed in this

section.

3.1 Descriptive Analysis

Table 1: Primary information of selected articles. Source:

Bibliometrix (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017).

Description Results

Timespan 1993:2022

Sources (Journals, Books, etc) 87

Documents 172

Annual Growth Rate % 9.25

Document Average Age 6.9

Average citations per doc 28.42

References 5593

Keywords Plus 644

Author’s Keywords 497

Authors 432

Authors of single-authored docs 13

Single-authored docs 18

Co-Authors per Doc 3.06

International co-authorships % 2.326

This research reviewed DEA and DES studies in the

port or seaport domain published between 1993 and

2022. Within these 29 years, Table 1 depicts that 172

relevant studies are published in 87 different sources,

written by a total of 432 authors, with an average of

28.42 citations per document. Single-authored stud-

ies account for only 3(13 authors) and there were 18

documents written by only a single author, implying

that there are the same authors wrote two or more ar-

ticles individually. Table 2 shows the total number

of DEA and DES publications for each year, with-

out distinction between the two. The output for the

ﬁrst 20 years (1993-2012) was 55 publications, sig-

niﬁcantly lower than 74 publications in the recent ﬁve

years of publications (2018 – 2022). A low-single-

digit publishing trend for early-stage research studies

in port performance adopting DES or DEA. However,

in 2009, it skyrocketed with 12 documents published.

The highest number of publications was in 2021 with

23 documents. This suggests a rising level of interest

in DES and data envelopment analysis in port-related

studies. Table 2 also show higher average citations per

publication and citations per year in the early years.

Citations tend to increase with the small number of

publications in the early years and the longer length

of time an article is published.

Table 2: General citation structure according to the com-

bined Scopus and WoS based on year (TP. Total Publica-

tions. TC. Total Citations).

Year TP TC Avg Citation

per Publication

Avg Citation

per Year

1993 1 292 292.00 10.07

2001 2 537 268.50 12.79

2002 2 164 82.00 4.10

2004 3 335 111.67 6.20

2021 23 94.99 4.13 4.13

2022 13 7.02 0.54

Figure 2: DEA vs DES vs Hybrid.

The yearly publication trend is presented in Fig.

2. The number of publications on DES or DEA in as-

sessing port performance has been growing at a pace

of 9.25% each year. Final ﬁltration of the articles re-

sulting 120 articles in DEA purview, 51 articles in

DES, and 1 article hybridising both methods. The de-

tail of the yearly publications of both methods can be

seen in Fig. 2. The only article published in both

databases applying both methods was in 2019 by Sis-

lioglu and his co-authors (Sislioglu et al., 2019). In

comparison to DES, DEA publications on port or ter-

minal efﬁciency have a higher volume and appear to

be increasing year after year. However, it is clear that

between 1994 and 2000, as well as in 2003, neither

Discrete-Event Simulation and Data Envelopment Analysis in Port Efﬁciency Evaluation: A Bibliometric Analysis and Mapping of

Combined Databases

method produced any papers on port efﬁciency. This

section entails the signiﬁcant aspects based on bib-

liometric analysis, such as the top journals, the most

cited and inﬂuential articles, the most proliﬁc and im-

pactful authors, and the most relevant institutions.

3.2 Top Journals

A total of 172 DES and DEA research in port-related

topics have been published in 87 academic journals.

In Table 3, the journal “Maritime Economics and Lo-

gistics” had the most articles published, with 21. This

journal also dominates the top chart in terms of its

index. “Maritime Policy and Management” is in the

second rank with 11 documents published, followed

by “OR Spectrum” with 7 articles. The other aca-

demic journals that have published at least ﬁve arti-

cles on DES or DEA in the port sector are listed in

the following ranking: “Asian Journal of Shipping

and Logistics”, “International Journal of Shipping

and Transport Logistics”, “Sustainability (Switzer-

land)”, “Transport Policy”, and “Transportation Re-

search Part A: Policy and Practice”. The remaining

two in the top ten list are “International Journal of

Transport Economics”, and Transportation Research

Part D: Transport and Environment. Table 3 reveals

that the top two academic outlets are journals within

the scope of the area itself. Meanwhile, the third-

ranked journal is concerned with the operations re-

search methods, which simulation and optimisation

area are included.

Table 3: Most relevant publication outlets (TP. Total Publi-

cations, TC. Total Citations).

Rank Sources TP h-index TC

1 Maritime Economics and Logistics 21 12 670

2 Maritime Policy and Management 11 7 527

3 OR Spectrum 7 7 321

4 Asian Journal of Shipping and Logistics 6 4 105

4 International Journal of Shipping and

Transport Logistics

6 5 161

6 Sustainability (Switzerland) 5 3 38

6 Transport Policy 5 4 197

6 Transportation Research Part A: Policy

and Practice

5 5 705

9 International Journal of Transport Eco-

nomics

4 4 55

9 Transportation Research Part D: Trans-

port and Environment

4 4 115

Articles published in “Transportation Research

Part A: Policy and Practice”, on the other hand, have

the highest total citation count, with 705 total ci-

tations. The ﬁrst article appeared in “Transporta-

tion Research Part A: Policy and Practice” apply-

ing DEA in the port study. The article titled “Efﬁ-

ciency measurement of selected Australian and other

international ports using data envelopment analysis”

by Tongzon (Tongzon, 2001) was published in 2001.

This paper individually has 437 citations. “Mar-

itime Economics and Logistics” has 670 citations,

published its ﬁrst article on port performance titled

“An alternative approach to efﬁciency measurement

of seaports” in 2004 by Park and De Prabir (Park

and Prabir, 2004). Meanwhile, another journal in the

top three of total citations is “Maritime Policy and

Management”, with 527 citations. Roll and Hayuth

(Roll and Hayuth, 1993) contributed the ﬁrst article

in “Maritime Policy and Management” on port per-

formance comparison applying DEA.

3.3 Most Cited Inﬂuential Articles

Scientiﬁc work with a higher number of citations is

widely acknowledged to have a greater impact on

other articles. Table 4 reports the papers that have

received the most citations. Since Scopus acts as

the master data, the number of duplicate article cita-

tions is based on information from Scopus, unless the

publications were retrieved from the WoS since they

were not in the Scopus database. From the combined

databases, the most cited article has 437 citations.

The article written by Tongzon (Tongzon, 2001), im-

plemented DEA to compare port performance of four

Australian ports with twelve international container

ports. Roll and Hayuth’s (Roll and Hayuth, 1993)

article in 1993 is the second most cited, and Barros

and Athanassiou’s (Barros and Athanassiou, 2004) in

2004 is third. All these articles report their ﬁndings

using DEA. The ﬁrst DES article by Shabayek and

Yeung (Shabayek and Yeung, 2002) is listed in the

fourth rank. Six of the top ten documents are within

the DEA scope, while the rest are within the DES

scope. Herein, simulation research in port studies can

be classiﬁed as later studies because all the ﬁrst arti-

cles in the top three journals focused on DEA in their

studies.

Annual impacts are citations for each publication

per year. Since it takes time for research to impact,

studies published in recent years have received few

citations. Global citation score (GCS) and local cita-

tion score (LCS) are two well-known citation terms in

calculating annual impact. According to Munim et al.

(Munim et al., 2020), a bibliometric indicator, GCS

is the total of all citations to a study in the relevant

database. In contrast, LCS is a citation metric that

indicates the volume of research that cite a speciﬁc

set of publications within a single database. How-

ever, as Scopus did not provide a GCS number and

it is challenging to calculate the GCS for the merged

databases, it was disregarded for this research. From

the perspective of most inﬂuential articles, they were

obtained by calculating the annual citations. Report-

edly, Tongzon’s (Tongzon, 2001) article also domi-

ICAISD 2023 - International Conference on Advanced Information Scientiﬁc Development

Table 4: Details of Most Cited Articles (TC. Total Citations. AC. Annual Citations).

Article Author(s) Year Source Approach TC AC

Efﬁciency measurement of selected Australian and

other international ports using data envelopment

analysis

Tongzon (Tongzon, 2001) 2001 Transportation Research Part A:

Policy and Practice

DEA 437 19.86

Port performance comparison applying data envel-

opment analysis (DEA)

Roll and Hayuth (Roll and

Hayuth, 1993)

1993 Maritime Policy & Management DEA 292 9.73

Efﬁciency in European seaports with DEA: Evi-

dence from Greece and Portugal

Barros and Athanassiou (Barros

and Athanassiou, 2004)

2004 Maritime Economics and Logistics DEA 204 10.74

A simulation model for the Kwai Chung container

terminals in Hong Kong

Shabayek and Yeung (Shabayek

and Yeung, 2002)

2002 European Journal of Operational

Research

DES 131 6.24

An alternative approach to efﬁciency measurement

of seaports

Park and De Prabir (Park and Pra-

bir, 2004)

2004 Maritime Economics and Logistics DEA 127 6.68

Effect of block length and yard crane deployment

systems on overall performance at a seaport con-

tainer transshipment terminal

Petering and Murty (Petering and

Murty, 2009)

2009 Computers & Operations Research DES 120 8.57

nated the average number of citations per year. In-

terestingly, while his paper is about DEA, the sec-

ond most inﬂuential yearly citations is authored by

Zehendner and Feillet (Zehendner and Feillet, 2014),

applied DES to improve the service quality of trans-

portation in seaport. Other notable studies in terms of

total citations per year include Barros and Athanas-

siou’s (Barros and Athanassiou, 2004), with 10.74 ci-

tations per year.

Table 5 and 6 show the LCS of both databases.

The top three articles in Scopus database applied

DEA in their studies, however, in WoS database, a

study by Zehendner and Feillet (Zehendner and Feil-

let, 2014) succeeded in breaking through the DEA

cluster and ﬁnished third. To summarise, Tongzon’s

(Tongzon, 2001) article is one of the most inﬂuen-

tial publications in the port domain. With the highest

local citation scores in both databases, his article is

one of the earliest papers to address port efﬁciency

using DEA. In Scopus, Wu and Goh’s (Wu and Goh,

2010) article received more citations than Zehend-

ner and Feillet’s (Zehendner and Feillet, 2014) arti-

cle, but both received the same number of citations in

the WoS. Table 4 shows that the top three cited arti-

cles are DEA clusters. Thus, simulations may beneﬁt

from DEA hybridization. The fact that all three of

these publications have received the most citations in

the Scopus database also indicates that more papers in

Scopus have cited the top three. When comparing the

two databases, articles published in Scopus received

more citations than WoS.

3.4 Most Proliﬁc and Impactful Authors

The 172 publications from the shortlist of the WoS

and Scopus databases were authored by 432 authors.

Three hundred ﬁfty-nine authors (83.10%) only fea-

tured once in the publications, ﬁfty-seven authors

(13.19%) appeared twice, eleven authors wrote three

articles, four authors had four appearances, and only

one author published 5 documents. Only Matthew Pe-

tering published 5 articles, three of which were his

own original writings. The top ten productive authors

were determined based on the frequency with which

each author contributed to publications. In search-

ing for the top ten proliﬁc authors, the author’s full

name should be carefully checked because the last

name and ﬁrst initials used may belong to different

person. The most productive author with ﬁve articles

published is Matthew Petering, followed by Pasquale

Legato and Chang Young-Tae with four publications

each. The top two author adopted DES method, while

the next in the ranking assessed port efﬁciency by

adopting the DEA method. Authors with also a sim-

ilar number of publications are Khalid Bichou, Jose

Tongzon, Rina Mary Mazza, Beatriz Tovar, Nguyen

Hong-Oanh, Halvor Schøyen and Lee Suhyung with

3 articles each. Although there are more authors with

three articles, the authors in the top ten rankings are

ranked based on fractionalized articles, which quanti-

ﬁes the individual author’s contribution to a published

article. The proportion of each author decreases when

an article has multiple authors. This clariﬁes the sec-

ond and third rankings of four published articles, as

well as the fourth through tenth rankings of three ar-

ticles. Due to their contributions to a set of articles,

for instance, Pasquale Legato is ranked second, and

Chang Young-Tae is ranked third. The higher value of

fractionalized articles is preferable because it denotes

that the author contributes more, even though both au-

thors have four articles that have been published.

Table 7 presents the most impactful authors in the

port-related studies using either simulation or DEA.

In terms of total citations, Jose Tongzon is the fore-

runner, while Matthew Petering is the ﬁrst in terms

of annual citations. Both also are the most inﬂuential

authors with the highest yearly citation of 24.27 for

Jose Tongzon and 27.57 for Matthew Petering. How-

ever, Jose Tongzon is considerably ahead of Matthew

Petering, with hundreds of citations. In conclusion,

research in simulation produces the most productive

author. In contrast, studies in DEA produces the most

impactful author.

Discrete-Event Simulation and Data Envelopment Analysis in Port Efﬁciency Evaluation: A Bibliometric Analysis and Mapping of

Combined Databases

Table 5: LCS of Scopus Database.

Authors Article Title Year Journal LCS

Tongzon (Tongzon, 2001) Efﬁciency measurement of selected Australian

and other international ports using data envel-

opment analysis

2001 Transportation Research Part A:

Policy and Practice

437

Roll and Hayuth (Roll and Hayuth,

1993)

Port performance comparison applying data en-

velopment analysis (DEA)

1993 Maritime Policy and Management 292

Barros and Athanassiou (Barros

and Athanassiou, 2004)

Efﬁciency in European seaports with DEA: Ev-

idence from Greece and Portugal

2004 Maritime Economics and Logistics 204

Shabayek and Yeung (Shabayek

and Yeung, 2002)

A simulation model for the Kwai Chung con-

tainer terminals in Hong Kong

2002 European Journal of Operational

Research

132

Park and De Prabir (Park and Pra-

bir, 2004)

An alternative approach to efﬁciency measure-

ment of seaports

2004 Maritime Economics and Logistics 127

Table 6: LCS of WoS Database.

Authors Article Title Year Journal LCS

Tongzon (Tongzon, 2001) Efﬁciency measurement of selected Australian

and other international ports using data envel-

opment analysis

2001 Transportation Research Part A:

Policy And Practice

261

Panayides et al. (Panayides et al.,

2009)

A critical analysis of DEA applications to sea-

port economic efﬁciency Measurement

2009 Transport Reviews 103

Zehendner and Feillet (Zehendner

and Feillet, 2014)

Beneﬁts of a truck appointment system on the

service quality of inland transport modes at a

multimodal container terminal

2014 European Journal Of Operational

Research

Wu and Goh (Wu and Goh, 2010) Container port efﬁciency in emerging and more

advanced markets

2010 Transportation Research Part E: Lo-

gistics And Transportation Review

Petering and Murty (Petering and

Murty, 2009)

Effect of block length and yard crane deploy-

ment systems on overall performance at a sea-

port container transshipment terminal

2009 Computers & Operations Research 93

3.5 Most Relevant Institutions

The impact of various institutions was investigated,

and the top ten most productive ones are listed in Ta-

ble 9. Shanghai Maritime University is rated ﬁrst with

9 publications (5.14%), followed by the Inha Uni-

versity and National University of Singapore with 8

publications each (4.57%). The other top productive

universities are Dalian Maritime University, Erasmus

University Rotterdam, Korea Maritime and Ocean

University, University Belgrade, University of Valen-

cia, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Aal-

borg University. In terms of total publications in the

top 10, two universities in China are leading with a to-

tal of 15 publications. These Chinese universities are

marine universities with a focus on nautical studies.

China participates in global trade through 34 major

ports and approximately 2000 minor ports. Further-

more, numerous multinational companies have relo-

cated their manufacturing sites to China, and in order

to meet the needs of those companies supply chains,

intermediaries or ﬁnal products are shipped by sea to

various parts of the world (Yuen et al., 2013). This has

resulted in a signiﬁcant increase in demand for sea-

port services in the region. It explains the large num-

ber of port-related studies conducted by academics

and practitioners in that country.

3.6 Network Analysis

The ﬁgure above illustrates the visualization of the

most inﬂuential keywords used by the authors of

Scopus and WoS. There are 4 clusters of keywords

Figure 3: Co-occurrence of Author’s Keywords.

(red, purple, blue, and green) used in the combined

databases, Scopus and WoS. When the nodes are

displayed in the same color, relevant keywords are

widely used together. The ﬁgure shows that port

efﬁciency, data envelopment analysis or DEA, and

simulation are the main keywords in the Scopus and

WoS databases. Besides, container terminal, con-

tainer ports, port productivity and stochastic frontier

analysis are closely related and frequently co-occur.

3.7 Collaboration Network

The collaboration between authors, institutions, and

countries was analysed and displayed using colour-

ful node mapping. Collaboration analysis was con-

ducted on the basis of downloaded data to estab-

ICAISD 2023 - International Conference on Advanced Information Scientiﬁc Development

Table 7: Details of Most Impactful Author (Rank by TC. TC. Total Citations. TP. Total Publications. AC. Annual Citations).

Rank Author TC TP AC Publication year (No. of articles)

1 Jose Tongzon 534 3 24.27 2016 (1), 2010 (1), 2001 (1)

2 Matthew Petering 386 5 27.57 2011 (1), 2010 (1), 2009 (3)

3 Yehuda Hayuth 292 1 9.73 1993 (1)

4 Yaakov Roll 292 1 9.73 1993 (1)

5 Carlos Pestana Barros 260 2 13.68 2008 (1), 2004 (1)

6 Manolis Athanassiou 204 1 10.74 2004 (1)

7 Mark Goh 165 2 11.79 2010 (1), 2009 (1)

8 Khalid Bichou 147 3 12.25 2013 (1), 2011 (2)

9 Chang Young-Tae 135 4 19.29 2021 (1), 2018 (2), 2016 (1)

10 Bram Borgman 134 2 10.31 2013 (1), 2010 (1)

Table 8: Most relevant publication outlets (TP. Total Publi-

cations, TC. Total Citations).

Rank Institution Country TP Percent

1 Shanghai Maritime University China 9 5.14

2 Inha University South Korea 8 4.57

2 National University of Singapore Singapore 8 4.57

4 Dalian Maritime University China 6 3.43

5 Erasmus University Rotterdam Netherlands 4 2.29

5 Korea Maritime and Ocean Univer-

sity

South Korea 4 2.29

5 University Belgrade Serbia 4 2.29

5 University of Valencia Spain 4 2.29

5 University of Wisconsin-

Milwaukee

USA 4 2.29

10 Aalborg University Denmark 3 1.71

Figure 4: Collaboration Network of Authors.

Figure 5: Collaboration Network of Afﬁliations.

lish bibliographic networks that represent collabora-

tion links between authors, institutions, and coun-

tries. The authors’ collaboration network is shown

in Fig. 4, with the nodes representing the authors

and the edges representing the co-authorship relation

among them. The font size indicates the frequency

of the publications, where the fewer co-authored pub-

lications, the smaller the size. After eliminating the

isolated nodes, eleven clusters emerge, demonstrat-

ing the strong collaboration among authors. There-

fore, with ﬁve writers, the red cluster depicts the most

prominent and substantial author collaboration net-

work. The results show strong collaboration between

Chang Young-Tae, Nguyen Hong-Oanh, Jose Tong-

zon, and Lee Suhyung. Their research studies mainly

focused on DEA in ports. Chang Young-Tae, Lee

Suhyung and Jose Tongzon are from Inha University,

South Korea, while Nguyen Hong-Oang is from the

University of Tasmania, Australia. Only two writ-

ers are represented another ten clusters, indicating a

lack of interaction. There is no interconnection be-

tween the clusters, showing that this area could be ex-

plored widely by the authors. Figure 5 displays the

institutions’ collaboration networks. The institutions

are the nodes, while the edges represent research re-

lationships between pairs of nodes. The red cluster

is the largest and most powerful, which consists of

seven universities. Figure 5 also shows that the blue

and red clusters are linked, implying that the institu-

tions in each cluster work closely together. The linked

red and blue clusters shown in the network also show

that there is space to progress overall author collabo-

ration within the simulation and DEA in port-related

studies. Based on Fig. 5, a strong collaboration can

be seen between Inha University and several univer-

sities such as Shanghai Maritime University, Dalian

Maritime University, Nanjing University of Informa-

tion Science and Technology, Korea Maritime Insti-

tute, Aalborg University, and University of Tasmania.

The authors who collaborated the most in Fig. 5 are

those from the same university. Figure 6 presents the

bibliographic network as well as a network of inter-

national partnerships. The information from the net-

works shows three clusters of collaboration between

countries. Red cluster is the strongest in this ﬁeld,

with four countries included. A lot of collaboration

going on in China, Canada, Thailand, Cyprus. The

other clusters, green and blue, consist of only two

countries, showing weak collaboration.

Discrete-Event Simulation and Data Envelopment Analysis in Port Efﬁciency Evaluation: A Bibliometric Analysis and Mapping of

Combined Databases

Figure 6: Collaboration Network of Countries.

4 DISCUSSIONS

This bibliometric analysis contributes to the literature

on DES or/and DEA in port-related studies. Based on

the keywords used to retrieve data from the Scopus

and WoS databases, only one study combined simu-

lation and DEA in their research while the rest were

conducted separately, either using DES or applying

DEA.

4.1 Merged Databases and Analysis

Difﬁculties

In conducting the merger of Scopus and WoS, several

uniqueness of both databases was presented. Several

things can be deduced from the author’s data analysis

utilising the full record collected from both databases.

First, Scopus only considers local citations, but WoS

includes both local and global citations. Kulkarni et

al. (Kulkarni et al., 2009) emphasised WoS was the

only practical way to obtain citation counts. Since

there is no information from one of the databases, cal-

culating the total global citation score is rather difﬁ-

cult. Thus, only local citations were considered in

this analysis. Kumpulainen and Sepp

anen (Kumpu-

lainen and Sepp

anen, 2022) agreed and only dis-

cussed about local citations score in their article. Sec-

ond, both databases provide author keywords, which

the author selects the best possible keywords to con-

vey the essence of the text. However, Scopus also pro-

vides indexed keywords, whereas WoS provides key-

words plus. Indexed keywords, as opposed to author

keywords, take into account plurals, other spellings,

and synonyms. Scopus chose the keywords, which

are standardised to vocabularies drawn from thesauri

owned or licenced by Elsevier. In contrast, keywords

plus includes words or phrases that commonly ap-

pear in the titles of references to articles, and excludes

the title of the article itself. To prevent unintentional

keyword misinterpretation for merged databases, the

analysis can be performed on author keywords. Third,

WoS offers a hyperlink that allows users to access

the article immediately from an excel ﬁle, whereas

Scopus only provides a link that must be copied and

pasted into the search engine. However, by manu-

ally changing it to hyperlink, the link can be directly

linked to the article. Fourth, although both databases

combined authors and afﬁliations in a single column,

Scopus went above and beyond by separating the au-

thors and their afﬁliations into separate columns.

Merging data through Bibliometrix package in R

can be arguable. First, in the Scopus database, the

number of local citations is misconstrued for the num-

ber of global citations. The local citations become

zero as a result, and global citations take the place of

the actual local citations. Second, the deletion of du-

plicate articles. Few articles in Scopus contained the

end of “oa” in the article titles, Interestingly, all re-

lated articles were published in “Maritime Economics

and Logistics” journal in 2017. The purpose of the

term is unknown since all the related articles not the

open access type. Scopus itself has column in its

database indicating whether the paper is of the open

access type or not. Due to the duplicated articles that

contained “oa” cannot be erased when merging both

databases using Bibliometrix package in R, they can

only be manually removed from the data by identify-

ing the doi number. Third, although the initials and

family name used by authors most likely belong to a

different person, Bibliometrix may mistakenly infer

that they are the same person. This can cause a mis-

take in the analysis of the top 10 authors in terms of

publications and citations. One should personally re-

view the article to guarantee the accuracy of the data

as just initials and a family name were provided in the

ﬁnal analysis.

4.2 Leveraging DES and DEA in Port

Efﬁciency Evaluation

Due to the market’s intense competition and the rapid

development of logistics and container transporta-

tion technologies, understanding container port per-

formance is more crucial than ever. Precise and useful

measures of seaport efﬁciency are becoming a chal-

lenge [34]. Since container terminals are infamous

for being stumbling blocks in the global supply chain,

even a 1% increase in efﬁciency at a major terminal

might have a big impact on businesses all over the

world (Petering and Murty, 2009). Operations in con-

tainer terminals have been researched for a variety of

ways to improve port service quality. However, prior

research has the propensity to oversimplify reality.

ICAISD 2023 - International Conference on Advanced Information Scientiﬁc Development

In the simulation, the objective of establishing the

model is very important. Container terminals have to

deal with a varying workload and irregular truck ar-

rivals over the day. As trucks coordinate operations

between the quayside and the yardside, poor perfor-

mance of this type of resource worsens the port con-

dition. Zehendner and Feillet (Zehendner and Feillet,

2014) agreed and stressed that the performance and

service quality of the entire terminal may decrease if

the peak of truck arrivals coincides with heavy work-

load periods for vessels, barges and trains. In or-

der to maximise productivity at the port, truck allo-

cation and scheduling are two areas that can be in-

vestigated using simulation. Despite the increasing

prominence of other modeling techniques, simulation

has achieved signiﬁcant development throughout the

last few decades and has increased its impetus in port

and terminal research. Resource allocation, the ap-

pointment system, and the schedule of unloading and

loading operations, which are linked to the prepon-

derance of discussions about how to improve port ser-

vice quality to reduce congestion and improve vessel

turnaround times. Thus, these scopes can be explored

more for the further analysis including movement of

containers within the terminal and issues related to

other resources such as quay gantry crane and yard

crane. In addition, simulation has the advantage of

providing data envelopment analysis possibilities for

further efﬁciency analysis. Adoption of DEA may

lead to the consideration of alternative techniques for

the measurement of port efﬁciency in the perspective

(Yuen et al., 2013). The DEA’s weakness is that it

is unable to show a complete picture of the ﬂow of

the port operations. By combining both methods, it

complements each method. As mentioned by Figueira

and Almada-Lobo (Figueira and Almada-Lobo, 2014)

these two approaches of simulation and optimisation

results in highly demanding methods in terms of com-

putational effort. In terms of publications, combining

both methods in port studies appears to be relatively

low.

While simulation studies are more focused on spe-

ciﬁc operations, DEA studies are broader in scope. To

ﬁll the gap, it is encouraged to use DEA to evaluate

the efﬁciency of detailed operations in ports. DEA

provides trends in efﬁciency values, and thus provides

a solid basis for continuous benchmarking, appraisal,

and improvement (Lin and Tseng, 2007). In the pre-

vious studies that combined DES and DEA, one thing

that connected both methods was the inputs used. In-

puts were treated as suggested scenarios in the sim-

ulation, thus producing the alternative solutions for

DEA. The alternative solutions were then evaluated

by DEA to determine the efﬁciency. In the top 10

highest citation articles in DEA, most of the articles

investigated port efﬁciency. The speciﬁc operations in

container terminal are rarely studied using DEA. Sur-

prisingly, only one paper combining DEA and DES

was found in this bibliometric analysis. Furthermore,

the aforementioned article investigated the potential

alternatives for port expansion in Turkey. Thus this

paper suggesting the combination of two methods in

assessing speciﬁc operations in container terminal.

5 CONCLUSIONS

A bibliometric review of 172 articles on DES or/and

DEA in port performance evaluation is presented in

this paper. These articles were published in 87 publi-

cation journals between 1993 and 2022, derived from

the Scopus and WoS databases. The results show

the increasing trend of publications throughout the

selected years. In terms of total publications by an

author, DES is leading. Interestingly, the number

of citations per author for the two approaches was

compared, and DEA came out on top with hundreds

of citations. Not only that, DEA dominates the top

ten most cited articles, indicating that previous stud-

ies have inﬂuenced a signiﬁcant number of research.

The study also reveals that authors in this research

ﬁeld prefer to publish their ﬁndings in the “Maritime

Economics and Logistics” journal. However, “Trans-

portation Research Part A: Policy and Practice” jour-

nal is leading in terms of total citations.

This research has several restrictions. First, this

study limits the research to speciﬁc keywords, and

only DES and DEA were considered to measure the

port efﬁciency. Second, the merging of two databases

raised few issues, the Scopus was set as a reference,

thus several information was dropped from the analy-

sis. Therefore, for the next evaluation, the data from

the WoS and Scopus can be analysed separately to en-

sure more detailed comparisons can also be explored

for future studies in port efﬁciency.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank the editors and anony-

mous referees for providing helpful comments and

suggestions, which improved the article. The regis-

tration fee is funded by Pembiayaan Yuran Prosid-

ing Berindeks (PYPB), Tabung Dana Kecemerlan-

gan Pendidikan (DKP), Universiti Teknologi MARA

(UiTM), Malaysia.

Discrete-Event Simulation and Data Envelopment Analysis in Port Efﬁciency Evaluation: A Bibliometric Analysis and Mapping of

Combined Databases

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