Exploring the vulnerability of transportation networks by entropy: A case study of Asia–Europe maritime transportation network

Abstract

With the rise of global trade, maritime transportation networks have become an indispensable element of logistics networks. Approximately 80% of the global trade volume is transported by sea with the maritime logistics network fueling global economic integration. Due to the uncertainty of the transportation process and the impact of accidents, the reliability analysis of the logistics network is a topic of immense interest. In this paper, we propose an original and novel model to quantitatively analyze the vulnerability of the maritime logistics network by considering the importance of each port in the network. Three centrality measures that consider different topology information of the network are used in this paper to identify the importance of ports. Different information about the network is considered through the joint entropy and the multiscale factor q to evaluate the vulnerability of the logistics network. The Asia–Europe maritime transportation network serves as a real-world example to demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of our proposed model. The experimental results suggest that the performance of the maritime network is closely related to the heterogeneity of the connectivity pattern and the process of decentralization can reduce the vulnerability of the maritime network.