## 2 Literature Review  
### Temporal Coordination Procedures  
Maritime logistic chains involve many agents and companies with different types of organizations. In multi-client port terminals, understood as terminals where the quay infrastructure is shared by several terminal operators that have placed loading arms in the same quay infrastructure, conflicting interests appear. Each terminal operator seeks a profit and a return on their investment, although all of them have common interests, such as reducing the anchoring time of their vessels caused by congestion and increasing their operational capacity. Port authorities pursue both private and public goals like contributing to regional economic growth and enhancing sustainability.  
The effects and implications of cooperation among all the different port agents in container terminals have been studied extensively in recent years. Specifically, the Port of Rotterdam and the Port of Barcelona have been analyzed to understand how the quality of hinterland access (trucks, railways, and barges) is important for seaport competitiveness [6; 7; 8; 9; 10; 11].  
[PERSON] and [PERSON] [7] identified a set of coordination problems among the actors involved in a port's hinterland chain and propose different coordination arrangements. The four coordination mechanisms are the introduction of incentives, the creation of an interfirm alliance, changing scope, and creating collective action. Incentives influence the behavior of actors. For example, bonuses or penalties could be established for companies that follow (or do not follow) the operational rules of a terminal operator. Interfirm alliances imply more responsibility and common arrangements among companies than incentives. They can include subcontracting, standards for quality and services, or formalized procedures. Possible coordination measures to change the scope of an organization could be vertical integration or the introduction of a new market. The last category enhances collective instead of individual action; for instance, branch associations or the development of information technology systems for a sector of the port industry or its whole.  
The multi-agent platform described in the manuscript is based on the last category because it seeks collective action for operational improvement in liquid bulk terminals.  
From a commercial standpoint, there are a few software tools to coordinate different port agents and manage liquid bulk berths. The existing ones (see Table 1) are costly, have been developed for container terminals, and are mostly designed for specific terminals. All these tools share opacity in terms of the optimization or heuristic models used for berth assignment and allow for little improvement from the user interface.  
Table 1 summarizes the current products available for port operations. Most of them can be applied to liquid bulk terminals, except PortChain--Motor optimization [12]. It focuses only on container terminals. Shipping companies are the main users of port operation software, although the relationships with terminal operators and port authorities are also considered in some software products (Suite Posidonia--Prodevelop--Spain [3], PortChain--Motor optimization--Denmark [12], Marine Enterprise Suite  
Cirrus Logistics--United Kingdom [5]). The proposed multi-agent platform HADES considers the coordination among shipping companies, terminal operators, and port authorities in terminals dedicated to liquid bulk. Therefore, HADES provides a new perspective to the temporal coordination problem in liquid bulk terminals, considering the different port agents involved.