Complex Economic Consequence Analysis to Protect the Maritime Infrastructure

Abstract

The marine transportation system (MTS) is a critical part of the nation's supply chain. Malicious actors, natural disasters, pandemics, geo-political events and larger marine casualties such as the 2021 Suez Canal grounding incident can disrupt the MTS and domestic and global supply chains. To date, most research and contingency planning has focused on single-event disruptions such as oil spills or security issues. While supply chains may be resilient enough to cope with a wide variety of single disruptions, aggregated challenges may result in cascading failures. There has been little analysis of the impacts of multiple disruptions that build on each other in complex ways. This suggests that modeling the impact of multiple vector disruptions on multiple MTS targets can help policy makers, business leaders, and others anticipate, plan for, mitigate, and rapidly recover from future complex disruptions. This paper describes an approach to research questions like: What are plausible examples of complex, multi-vector disruptions to the MTS? What could make their outcomes more complicated and challenging than those of single disruptions? What are their consequences for different components of the MTS? What are some pre-disruption mitigations and post-disruption resilience tactics that might be useful in such cases? How can we estimate the time to implement them, the costs of implementation, and the reduction of impact of such measures? The project described is developing a framework to address such questions. The framework will be used to analyze the impact of different combinations of individual disruptions, including natural disasters and climate change; security events, including cyber, accidents and marine casualties; and social/political disruptions. The analysis will focus on the total economic consequences of these threat combinations and transition into a user-friendly decision-support tool to improve risk management.