Research On Evolution Mechanism And Cooperation Development Of The Pearl River Delta Port System

Port as the regional logistics center, has become an important base of industrial activitiesand the growing point of urban development, which also plays an important role in economicand social development. The evolution of port systems also has a significant impact on theregional, national and global economic development. At present, many regional port groupshave been formed in lots of countries and regions all over the world. According to the practiceof these regional port groups, we can know that integrating the factors of regional ports，increasing cooperation with other ports in the regional group, all of the above could promotethe economic development and strengthen the overall competitiveness of regional portsystem.There are as many as60ports in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) and each port is fiercelyindependent. However, the cooperation between the regional ports in the construction andplanning is still lacking, the competition among the regional ports is out-of-order, and this haswasted the ports resources, weakened the whole competitiveness of the port system seriously.It has become an urgent problem that how to hold the evolvement of the trend correctly,analyze the difference of port interactive development, combine the regional ports resources,and coordinate development among the PRD port system.Therefore, this paper firstly analyzes the current situation and evolution theory ofregional port system both in China and abroad, describes the development history ofEuropean port system, New York-New Jersey port and Tonkin Bay port system, andsummarizes their development experience and general development rule of the evolution ofregional port group. Secondly, this paper studies the evolvement of throughput centralizationand the transfer of traffic center of the port system in a long time span by several quantitativeanalysis tools from the dimensions of both time and space. In particular, the underlying forcesdriving the PRD port system evolution is identified, an evolution mode of spatial structure ofthe port system is developed and future evolution trend of the port system is forecasted. Andthen, aiming at the development history and evolution trend of the PRD port system, thesystem dynamics mode is established by finding dynamic relations between various factors.Through simulation, the study shows the results of container forecasting index in PRD port system and their respective roles，thus lay the foundation of cooperation development of thewhole port system. At the end of this paper, it raises the possible competition and co-operationof the PRD port system from a strategic perspective based on the underlying evolution forcesand forecast. The results of these studies will be able to effectively improve the overallcompetitiveness of the PRD port system, which is important to accelerate the PRD regionaleconomic integration process.