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 can-not be assessed through route availability or port capacity alone, as redirected flows may generate new constraints and dependencies within the resulting logistics config-uration. This study examines how maritime rerouting reconfigures logistics dependen-cies and under which conditions alternative ports provide effective rather than merely nominal substitutability. A comparative case-study approach is applied to five Euro-pean ports—Algeciras, Valencia, Barcelona, Rotterdam and Sines—following the Red Sea crisis. The study develops a Post-Rerouting Sequential Stress Test (PR-SST) com-bining maritime connectivity and port capacity with function-specific gateway and transhipment pathways, while incorporating sustainability as a cross-cutting dimen-sion. The analysis distinguishes nominal capacity from effective substitutability and introduces post-rerouting dependency to capture dependencies that emerge or inten-sify following adaptation. The comparative assessment shows that the effectiveness of an alternative port depends not only on its capacity to receive redirected flows, but al-so on its functional role and the continuity of the subsequent logistics pathway. The PR-SST therefore extends resilience assessment beyond maritime rerouting and indi-vidual port capacity towards the integrated logistics configuration through which re-directed flows continue.