Identifying port maritime communities: application to the Spanish case

The aim of this paper is to detect port maritime communities sharing similar international trade patterns, by a modelisation of maritime traffic using a bipartite weighted network, providing decision-makers the tools to search for alliances or identify their competitors. Our bipartite weighted network considers two different types of nodes: one represents the ports, while the other represents the countries where there are major import/export activity from each port. The freight traffic among both types of nodes is modeled by weighting the volume of product transported. To illustrate the model, the Spanish case is considered, with the data segmented by each type of traffic for a fine tuning. A sort of link prediction is possible, finding for those communities with two or more ports, countries that are part of the same community but with which some ports do not have yet significant traffic. The evolution of the traffics is analyzed by comparing the communities in 2009 and 2019. The set of communities formed by the ports of the Spanish port system can be used to identify global similarities between them, comparing the membership of the different ports in communities for both periods and each type of traffic in particular.