Gateway Access Monitor — Methodology v1.1

World Research Institute · Methodology v1.1 · published 1 October 2026 · amended 18 October 2026 · effective from the October 2026 edition · next scheduled review August 2027

How to read the Monitor

The Gateway Access Monitor assesses, each month, how reliably commercial users can secure passage through seven of the world's principal maritime chokepoints. Three of the seven — the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal / Red Sea corridor and the Strait of Hormuz — receive a full assessment across eight dimensions of access; all seven appear in the transit-count table. Each of the three fully assessed gateways carries a headline reading, for example "2 of 6 applicable access dimensions deteriorating": a count of how many of the dimensions that apply to that gateway worsened since the previous edition (the denominator is the number of dimensions applicable to that gateway), published with the reason for each. It is not a score, a rating or a ranking, and counts are not comparable across gateways. The Monitor publishes no composite score, no ranking of chokepoints and no numeric forecast, and its readings do not enter the WRI Logistics Index. Each edition states its data as-of date; cite that date when quoting an edition.

1. What the Monitor measures

The Monitor applies WRI's Logistics Access Reliability framework, which separates the capacity a gateway has from the capacity a user can actually obtain, use and recover on predictable terms. It reads four states of capacity: designed (what the infrastructure was built for), permitted (what present conditions allow), bookable (what a user can actually reserve) and delivered (whether secured capacity arrives at a predictable time and cost, under stable rules, and can be recovered if an arrangement fails). The gap between successive states is what the Monitor measures: a gateway can be fully open while bookable capacity is scarce and delivered access is unpredictable. The eight dimensions of section 2 read these states in turn: designed capacity through Nominal capacity; permitted capacity through Effective capacity; bookable capacity through Reservable capacity and Allocation rules; delivered access through Waiting time, Cost of secured passage, Access uniformity and Recovery flexibility.

It is a companion series to the WRI Logistics Index. The Logistics Index measures the direction of logistics activity across 42 economies; the Monitor explains whether the capacity behind that activity remains commercially accessible. Monitor readings never enter the computation of any Logistics Index: the units differ (gateways are not economies) and the scales differ (published facts, not a diffusion reading). An economy can show strengthening logistics activity while its principal gateway's access deteriorates; both facts are published side by side.

Coverage. Seven chokepoints are tracked: the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, Bab el-Mandeb, the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Malacca, the Strait of Gibraltar and the Cape of Good Hope. Panama, Suez / Red Sea and Hormuz receive the full assessment in v1.0, chosen because each is under active constraint and together they cover three of the five allocation regimes and three of the four rungs of the access-uniformity ladder below. Coverage is extended only by a new methodology version.

Level of observation. Readings are made at the gateway level: whether a vessel or carrier can secure passage. "Commercial users" means carriers and, through them, shippers; the Monitor does not observe the allocation of cargo space on a vessel (section 6).

2. The eight dimensions

Each fully assessed gateway is read monthly across eight dimensions. Every dimension carries a finding with its unit, a direction against the previous edition with a one-line reason, an evidence label and its sources.

A dimension that structurally does not exist under a gateway's regime is reported as not applicable with the reason, carries no direction and is excluded from that gateway's count. A dimension that exists but is only partly evidenced is read on the available evidence, counted, and the limitation stated. Observed transits are reported as utilisation of permitted capacity, not as capacity: a demand-driven fall in transits is not a deterioration of access.

Access uniformity is graded on a fixed ladder of decreasing predictability: Uniform (same terms for every user) → Rule-differentiated (transparent rules differentiate by price, vessel class, cargo type or booking window) → Identity-conditional (access varies by flag, affiliation, ownership or destination) → Permissioned-discretionary (case-by-case grants). Published rules and observed practice are both read, and the published rung is the lower of the two. Each reading names the party whose published rule or statement conditions access, as the cited document describes it; observed differentials are attributed to their source and never inferred from aggregate transit counts.

Recovery flexibility is assessed on published rules only; actual recovery outcomes are private commercial data and are never estimated.

Cost of secured passage is read from published prices where an authority publishes them. Where an authority publishes auction volumes or a distribution but not individual winning bids — the Panama Canal Authority's practice — reported premiums are press-reported figures and are labelled as such, with the outlet and any authority confirmation named. Documented auction outcomes are published beneath the reading as an evidence-labelled table (date of auction, vessel class, premium and its report status, the rules in force); the table is a record, not a series: it carries no direction, is never averaged and is not a supplementary indicator.

3. Allocation regime

Each gateway carries one tag describing how passage is allocated: Unconstrained, Queue-rationed, Convoy-scheduled, Reservation-rationed (with the modifier auction-binding when standard booking slots are exhausted and additional slots are allocated by auction) or Security-constrained. The tags are not ranked from best to worst, and a change of tag is not by itself an improvement or a deterioration. Where more than one mechanism operates, the tag is the mechanism through which the operating authority allocates passage and any security constraint is named as secondary. At v1.0: Panama — reservation-rationed (auction-binding); Suez / Red Sea — convoy-scheduled, security routing secondary; Hormuz — security-constrained. The regime determines which dimensions apply. A change of the auction-binding modifier is a finding under allocation rules, not a change of regime.

4. Direction and the headline reading

Each applicable dimension is read as improving, stable or deteriorating against the previous edition, with a one-line reason: improving means higher stated or permitted capacity, more slots offered, lower published waiting time, lower cost of secured passage, fewer or looser binding constraints, a move toward the Uniform end of the uniformity ladder, or more recovery options. Where findings within a dimension conflict, the direction follows the finding that binds passage for the marginal unreserved user, and the conflict is stated. Findings reported in whole units (slots or transits per day) are stable only when unchanged; other quantitative findings are stable when they move by less than 5%; qualitative findings are stable when the governing rule text is unchanged. A dimension not applicable in the previous edition, or a gateway whose allocation regime changed, carries "no comparison" and is excluded from that month's count. Re-labelling a tag under a new methodology version, with no change in how passage is allocated, is not a change of regime.

The headline reading, "n of m applicable access dimensions deteriorating", counts only applicable dimensions and is published with each dimension's direction and reason. It is a simple count, not a score, and counts are not comparable across gateways.

5. Sources and evidence

Precedence, highest first: the operating authority's latest advisory or circular → the authority's operational statistics → the authority's press releases → validated operational datasets (IMF PortWatch) → carrier and insurer publications → press, used only where primary data are unavailable and always labelled. A later authority advisory supersedes an earlier one on the same measure; advisories are read in full, and a measure with several effective dates is reported step by step.

Each figure carries an evidence label: primary-published (the authority's own figure), derived (computed from primary figures by a stated formula), third-party estimate (attributed), WRI floor or range (a stated bound where no point value is observable), or press-reported. Each edition states its data as-of date and its AIS data cut-off; current-month AIS figures are month-to-date and marked as such; the PortWatch data vintage (the date the daily series was retrieved) is stated with the transit-count table. Findings are produced under WRI's Research Standards; editorial responsibility for every edition rests with the named editor in section 10.

6. Scope of observation

The Monitor observes what authorities, AIS data, carriers and insurers publish. It cannot observe total booking demand, rejected booking requests, cargo rollovers, customer-specific allocations or prices, or actual rebooking success. Published slot counts show how much capacity was offered and used, not how much demand competed for it. All readings are therefore observed gateway access; a verified commercial reading, supplemented by carrier, forwarder and shipper booking data, would be a distinct measure and is not implied.

7. References and the transit-count table

The seven chokepoints are observed through daily transit counts from IMF PortWatch (Sources: Kpler; UN Global Platform; IMF PortWatch (portwatch.imf.org)): one AIS-observed crossing per transit, both directions, PortWatch's vessel coverage as published. On the Monitor page this is the table headed "Comparable core". Counts run to a stated cut-off date, are monthly means computed by WRI from PortWatch's daily counts (an aggregation that is WRI's, not the IMF's), carry no seasonal adjustment, and month-to-date figures are finalised in the following edition; the daily counts themselves are available from IMF PortWatch. Each comparison states its reference. From the September 2026 edition: June 2023 — a full month of undisrupted traffic before the Red Sea attacks on shipping began in November 2023 — for Suez, Bab el-Mandeb and the Cape of Good Hope; the calendar-2025 twelve-month mean — the last full calendar year without a draft restriction or a reduction of the daily slot offer, and below the authority's stated capacity — for Panama; and June 2023 as a common reference for Hormuz, Malacca and Gibraltar, with February 2026, the last full month before transits collapsed in March 2026, printed alongside for Hormuz. The August 2026 launch edition compares every chokepoint with June 2023. The definition of each reference changes only by methodology version; its value is recomputed from the current PortWatch vintage at each edition (below). Where a cited source states that a substantial share of traffic is not AIS-visible, counts are reported as a floor.

Transit stability (from the September 2026 edition). Beside each monthly mean the table reports how dependable daily passage was within the month, computed from the same daily counts: the number of days (and the longest run of days) on which the 7-day rolling mean of transits sat below 80% of the previous month's mean — how far the month fell short of its own recent level, distinct from the level comparison against the reference; and the day-to-day volatility net of counting noise, flagged where variance exceeds twice the mean. Chokepoints averaging fewer than 10 transits a day carry only the day counts. A single-day count above twice the highest of the reference level, the previous month's mean and the current month's median is excluded from the stability statistics as a data artefact, and the number excluded is printed; the monthly mean is not adjusted. PortWatch revises earlier days; reference values are recomputed from the current PortWatch vintage at each edition, the vintage date is stated with the table, and material revisions are noted. An improvement in observed transits is read as sustained only when the 7-day rolling mean has held at or above the previous month's mean for 14 consecutive days.

8. Outlook

Each fully assessed gateway carries a qualitative outlook with its basis stated — announced measures, hydrology, or none — limited to announced effective dates within 30 days, a base case with named risks to three months, scenarios to six months, and structural conditions only beyond that. No numeric forecast is published, and no indicator in this methodology is presented as a leading indicator.

9. Revisions and versioning

Each edition is a permanent record, and readings change only in defined ways. Within its month an edition may be refreshed for a superseding advisory, revised data or an error. Every refresh is announced on the edition by a dated notice; what changed is stated at the passage for an update and on the corrections log for a correction. From the October 2026 edition, the as-of date stays the edition's evidence cut. A change caused by a document or data issued after publication is recorded as an update; an error in a figure or statement as published is recorded as a correction, whenever it is found. Corrections are listed, with what was published, what is correct and the governing document, on WRI's corrections log; from the November 2026 edition, updates are listed on the edition page, each with its date and governing document, not on the log. A change of spelling, typography, layout, links or wording that alters no figure, reading, finding or the meaning of any statement is made on the page as WRI's Research Standards provide. From the October 2026 edition, an edition's prior-month readings publish provisional wherever the underlying PortWatch vintage has not yet completed that month, and are finalised by a dated data refresh when the full-month vintage lands (typically by the 8th); provisional readings are labelled wherever they appear, and that scheduled finalisation is neither an update nor a correction. Month-to-date AIS figures within an edition's own month are finalised at the following edition's data refresh on the same terms. The August 2026 launch edition pre-dates this methodology and is labelled as such; its references, direction counts and evidence labelling follow launch-edition conventions and are not comparable with editions from September 2026 onward. Changes to definitions, taxonomy or references are announced at least one edition in advance and recorded in the version history at the end of this document.

No composite access score is published. Whether any composite adds information beyond the eight-dimension reading will be decided in August 2027 on twelve months of tracked data.

10. Governance and independence

The Monitor is produced and published by the World Research Institute (WRI), the intelligence and research arm of the World Certification Institute (WCI) — unrelated to the World Resources Institute — and funded by the WCI group from general resources. No gateway authority, carrier, insurer or data vendor assessed or cited in the Monitor funds, sponsors or reviews it before publication, and, at the date of this methodology and to the best of WRI's knowledge after enquiry, neither WRI nor WCI holds a financial interest in any of them; this statement is re-affirmed at each annual methodology review. Sales of WRI's separate Logistics Index country reports, on published terms to any buyer, do not influence Monitor findings; any WCI relationship — including a certification engagement — with a party that is the subject of a finding is disclosed on that edition. Editorial responsibility rests with James Carter, Senior Economist.

11. Publication, access and terms

Editions are published on the 1st of each month at 09:00 UTC and are named for the month of publication: an edition published on 1 October is the October edition at intelligence.worldresearch.org/monitor/2026-10, with /monitor resolving to the latest edition. Each edition reads all evidence to its stated as-of date — the preceding month's completed authority figures where published, and month-to-date AIS figures. Editions are not embargoed; the date of the next edition is shown on the Monitor page and the release calendar. Each edition publishes the eight-dimension findings with direction, reason and cited source for each fully assessed gateway, the transit-count table (WRI's monthly means) and the supplementary-indicator series as CSV, each accompanied by a statement of which columns reproduce or derive from a named source, the source citation and, for PortWatch-derived columns, a link to the IMF's terms of use.

WRI's findings, directions, reasons, outlooks, headline readings, text, and figures WRI computes solely from authority-published inputs (the Queue Planning Ratio, the advisory count) are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) with the citation below. Figures originating from the Panama Canal Authority, IMF PortWatch (Kpler; UN Global Platform) or any other named source, and figures WRI derives from PortWatch data (transit means and comparisons), remain subject to that source's terms and are excluded from the grant. AIS-derived figures must be attributed as "Sources: Kpler; UN Global Platform; IMF PortWatch (portwatch.imf.org)" and are used under the IMF's "Use of IMF Data" terms (imf.org/en/About/copyright-and-terms).

The Monitor is published for information and research. Its readings are WRI's opinion on the published evidence at the stated as-of date; they are not statements of fact about any party or any future condition, and are not advice on routing, chartering, insurance, investment, trading or any other decision. They are provided without warranty of any kind and, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, WRI accepts no liability for any loss arising from reliance on them. Names of authorities, companies and organisations appear only as the cited sources describe them. "Gateway Access Monitor" and "WRI Logistics Index" are titles of World Research Institute publications; use of Monitor content under the licence does not imply endorsement.

Corrections and right of reply. Requests for correction go to monitor@worldresearch.org and are acknowledged within five working days. A party that is the subject of a finding may submit a response, which WRI publishes alongside the finding on the edition page within ten working days, attributed and without editorial change. A response should come from an identifiable representative, address the finding and run to no more than 300 words; material that is unlawful, defamatory of a third party, confidential or promotional is not published, and WRI may append a brief editorial note. Media: media@worldresearch.org. The technical note behind this methodology is available to researchers on request.

Citation. World Research Institute, Gateway Access Monitor, Methodology v1.1, October 2026. Editions: World Research Institute, Gateway Access Monitor — Month YYYY, data as of [date shown].

Supplementary indicators

Two supplementary indicators are published for the Panama Canal. Their definitions are fixed and their full series are published as CSV; they are not used in the headline reading, and their standing is reviewed in August 2027.

Queue Planning Ratio (Panama Canal). How much worse the month's highest published Canal Waters Time was than the month's average, after subtracting the in-transit (lockage) time the Panama Canal Authority publishes for the same month; a reading of 2.0 means the highest published day's queue was twice the average day's. With CWT_avg and CWT_high the month's average and highest published Canal Waters Time and T_avg, T_high and T_low the month's average, highest and lowest published In-Transit Time, three figures are published: lower bound (CWT_high − T_high) ÷ (CWT_avg − T_avg); central (CWT_high − T_avg) ÷ (CWT_avg − T_avg); upper bound (CWT_high − T_low) ÷ (CWT_avg − T_avg). The inputs and the three resulting figures are printed with every reading. Differences of less than 0.1 between months are not read as movement; a lower bound below 1.0 indicates inconsistent published inputs and is flagged, not interpreted. The ratio is in the spirit of percentile travel-time-reliability measures used in highway performance measurement; the ACP publishes no percentile series, so the reading is a monthly maximum rather than a percentile and is read with its month-to-month persistence. It pools booked and unbooked vessels and reads dispersion relative to the average; absolute hours are printed alongside. Series: February 2022 onward (the ACP published no summary for February 2024; that month is absent, not interpolated).

Advisory count (Panama Canal). How many advisories the Panama Canal Authority published in the calendar year whose titles carry an access-condition term — including clarifications and re-issues, and relaxations as well as restrictions. The count is produced by an automated screen of the advisory titles in the authority's public archive (the archive's file names carry the titles) for the terms booking, transit, draft, condition, surcharge, slot, auction, reservation, modification and cancellation, with routine monthly operations summaries excluded; the screen's output is published without manual addition or removal. It is therefore an activity count, not a count of rule changes, and it does not capture advisories whose titles carry none of those terms — Advisory A-29-2026, which reduced the daily slot offer and postponed draft reductions, is not counted. It is comparable only within the Panama Canal over time and is published with the list of advisories counted (CSV). Series from 2022, the first year the archive's file names carry the titles: 2022: 13 · 2023: 32 · 2024: 23 · 2025: 12 · 2026: year to date at the archive retrieval date stated with the figure.

Annex A. Evidence-confidence labels

Every load-bearing claim behind a direction call or access state records four properties — meaning (what the observation establishes if true), timing (event date, observation window, publication date, revision dates — kept distinct), authority (one of the six §5 classes) and uncertainty (zero or more flags: unverified outcome · unquantified volume · incomplete period · revisable count · single-source · contested account).

Fixed meaning-phrase lists by dimension:

Each fully assessed gateway carries one stated rollup line beneath its direction block — Evidence confidence: High / Moderate / Limited — basis — assigned by rule: High when every load-bearing figure rests on authority, operator or operational-dataset evidence; Moderate when any load-bearing figure rests on carrier/insurer notices or tracking estimates; Limited when any load-bearing figure rests on attributed reporting alone or carries a contested-account or single-source flag. The rollup never upgrades a figure's own label.

Annex B. High-frequency source revisions

High-frequency transit estimates are preliminary by construction: movements with transponders off are invisible at first print and partially recovered in later vintages. The Monitor records observation date and vintage date separately for every high-frequency figure; never compares figures across vintages as if they were different days' traffic; and treats first prints on these series as floors until a later vintage confirms them. Each edition publishes a revision summary — the number of observation-days revised, the direction split and the largest revision — with the full observation-by-vintage table as CSV. Evidence base at v1.1: of eleven observation-days with multiple recorded vintages between 26 August and 15 September 2026, ten revised upward — several roughly doubling — and one downward by a single vessel. A sharp single-day fall in a first print is weak evidence of collapse; a sharp single-day recovery is equally weak evidence of recovery. Direction is read from confirmed vintages and multi-day persistence.

Annex C. Completed-passage and milestone ledger

Transit totals measure flow; they do not distinguish who can complete a passage on ordinary commercial terms. The ledger records discrete verifiable events in two classes: completed passages (a named vessel completing a voyage class that had been impaired, labelled as a single completion) and milestones (infrastructure or service events on the ladder announced → scheduled → observed → verified). A short per-gateway table publishes in each edition; the full ledger publishes as CSV.

Annex D. Alternative-route dependency map

Where a gateway is impaired, the edition states the practical alternatives and the dependencies they share, cargo class by cargo class. Rules: alternatives are cargo-specific (a crude pipeline cannot substitute for LNG or container transport); the same cargo is never counted at successive gateways; and a route is treated as usable only on evidence of completed loadings or passages, not geography. Where alternatives share infrastructure or security exposure, the shared dependency is named.

Version history. v1.0 — 10 September 2026: first version, effective from the September 2026 edition. v1.1 — 1 October 2026: publication moves to the 1st of each month at 09:00 UTC, with prior-month readings provisional at release and finalised by a dated data refresh (§9, §11; announced on the September 2026 edition on 16 September 2026 — one edition in advance, as §9 requires); adds Annexes A–D (evidence-confidence labels, high-frequency source revisions, completed-passage and milestone ledger, alternative-route dependency map). Effective from the October 2026 edition. v1.1, amended 18 October 2026 (§9): from the November 2026 edition, updates and the scheduled finalisation of prior-month readings are shown with their dates on the edition page, and the corrections log lists corrections, of statements as well as figures; wording-only changes follow the Research Standards; the as-of date stays the edition's evidence cut, as already applied in the October 2026 edition. No definition, taxonomy or reference changes.