With the continuous development of smart ports, the construction of port information systems has become the construction focus of the future development of such ports. However, the existing performance evaluation system for port information systems represents a research gap. It cannot effectively achieve specific improvement in the construction of information systems for port services and capabilities. In this paper, an evaluation index system was forged from the three perspectives of the operating level, management capability, and economic efficiency. As a first step, starting from the current situation of Beibu Gulf Port (Port B) construction, the three dimensions of the evaluation index system were determined using the scheme of literature review, questionnaire research, and fieldwork. Additionally, through adversarial interpretive structural modeling (AISM), it is concluded that the port loading and unloading operation capability and service level are the fundamental factors for measuring the construction performance of the container terminal operation system (CTOS). The results are used as input to construct an analytic network process (ANP) model to obtain the index weights. Finally, the gray clustering method (GCM) is introduced to construct a quantitative evaluation model to quantitatively evaluate the construction performance of the Port B CTOS. The quantitative benefits brought by the construction of the CTOS are finally verified. The scores of the corresponding dimensions of the port before and after the construction of the CTOS system in Beibu Gulf Port are obtained experimentally. The conclusion shows that the construction of CTOS makes the port operating level module improve the most, from 40.023 to 70.733 points; at the same time, it is found that two aspects, i.e., green security and economic benefits, in current construction are directions requiring further work in future port construction. Finally, a visualized quantitative analysis and evaluation method for the performance of smart port construction is proposed.

Counts of trade links are often used as evidence of diversification, yet they say little about how value is distributed across those links. Using bilateral flows for selected lithium, cobalt and nickel products among 72 economies from 2010 to 2024, we built directed, value-weighted networks and examined them with multiscale entropy measures, lagged formation models and disruption tests. Here, entropy is used in the information-theoretic sense to measure how evenly trade value, network weight or motif participation is distributed across routes and structural modes; for route-value entropy, exp(H) is the effective number of equally weighted routes. The number of lithium links increased from 180 to 290, but its entropy-effective route count declined from 38.68 to 12.75. Nickel displayed a similar divergence, falling from 118.84 to 21.81 effective routes as links increased, whereas cobalt moved in the opposite direction. Across layer-years, flow entropy was associated with the share of trade retained under targeted attack (ρ = 0.754; Holm-adjusted p = 0.001). Binary dependence between lithium and nickel rose over time, although their weighted divergence was still 0.907 in 2024. In the China-removal experiment at the largest capacity margin, 95.7% of nodes survived but only 33.8% of trade value remained. For these product baskets, a larger network therefore need not be a more diversified one, and preserved connectivity can coexist with substantial economic loss.