NextPort is the technological partner and digital twin of the EU-ETS Observatory of State Ports, the initiative called by State Ports to measure the effect of carbon costs on maritime transport and port competitiveness. The company develops and operates the data platform that underpins the consortium's analysis, and its technology is behind the second report of the observatory, published with data up to March 2026, which estimates a ten-point decline in the share of major entry ports in the European Union in long-distance transport, from 67% to 57% between the first quarter of 2023 and the same period in 2026.
The platform managed by NextPort combines four types of information: vessel tracking, port call data, emissions records, and intelligence on maritime services. Based on this, the system reconstructs the behavior of the transport network and allows the observatory to test its working hypothesis, the possible diversion of traffic from community ports to nearby hubs not subject to the same regulatory costs. A digital twin is, in general terms, a virtual replica of a physical system — in this case, the network of ports, vessels, and maritime services — fed with real data and continuously updated, allowing one to observe its behavior as it evolves.
The main technical novelty of this second edition is the incorporation of tracking at the container level. With this layer of data, the platform can connect the movements of vessels with the movements of cargo, that is, track the merchandise after its arrival at European ports and neighboring ports outside the Union. This traceability allows analysts to identify three phenomena that until now were difficult to isolate: the rerouting of traffic, connectivity weakening, and possible activity gains by non-community hubs.
The difference is relevant from a methodological point of view. An analysis based solely on the behavior of vessels detects when a call disappears or a service changes rotation but does not reveal what happens to the cargo: a container can continue arriving at the same final destination by another route, through a transshipment at a different port or a different feeder connection. By descending to the container level, the platform allows one to observe changes in port choice, transshipment activity, and feeder connections, thus distinguishing between a simple reorganization of services and an effective displacement of merchandise flows.
