Beyond Rerouting: Resilience and Dependency in Sustainable Port–Hinterland Logistics

Maritime disruptions increasingly redirect vessels and cargo towards alternative routes and ports. Although rerouting can preserve connectivity, its effectiveness cannot be assessed through route availability or port capacity alone, as redirected flows may generate new constraints and dependencies within the resulting logistics configuration. This study examines how maritime rerouting reconfigures logistics dependencies and under which conditions alternative ports provide effective rather than merely nominal substitutability. A comparative case-study approach is applied to five European ports—Algeciras, Valencia, Barcelona, Rotterdam and Sines—following the Red Sea crisis. The study develops a Post-Rerouting Sequential Stress Test (PR-SST) combining maritime connectivity and port capacity with function-specific gateway and transhipment pathways, while incorporating sustainability as a cross-cutting dimension. The framework is operationalised through a Post-Rerouting Sequential Assessment (PR-SA), which applies its sequential diagnostic logic to the five selected ports using quantitative indicators and documentary evidence. The analysis distinguishes nominal capacity from effective substitutability and introduces post-rerouting dependency to capture dependencies that emerge or intensify following adaptation. The comparative assessment indicates that port capacity and maritime connectivity alone are insufficient to establish effective substitutability across the five ports. Instead, substitutability depends on the functional role of each port and the continuity of the subsequent logistics pathway, while post-rerouting dependencies may constrain alternative configurations. The findings illustrate how the PR-SST can support the assessment of logistics constraints and dependencies beyond the level of individual ports. The framework therefore extends resilience assessment beyond maritime rerouting and individual port capacity to the integrated logistics configuration through which redirected flows continue.