Port vulnerability assessment from a supply Chain perspective

Abstract

Rapid development of maritime transportation networks meets international trade demands while rendering them in high risk and disruption concerns particularly at ports being the bottlenecks of the whole flows. Port operations calls for an effective approach to assess ports vulnerability and to ensure the resilience of their associated maritime supply chains (MSC). However, traditional quantitative risk analysis reveals challenges due to data incompleteness and ambiguity, and operational and environmental uncertainty when being applied in ports vulnerability analysis. This paper aims to develop a novel port vulnerability assessment (PVA) framework, which can guide and realise a standardised vulnerability analysis process for the ports from different geographies involving in the same MSC and hence the resources can be better managed from a global network level for optimal resilience of the chain. It is especially important for the shipping and port industries which are in nature international and desires strong international uniform standardization. The fuzzy theory, evidential reasoning (ER) approach, and expected utility theory are combined in a holistic way to form the proposed PVA framework. The new framework is validated and demonstrated by using a case study in which five key ports along an established MSC in China are investigated. The findings can be used as a stand along method to compare the vulnerability levels of the ports in an MSC and/or integrated with decision optimisation methods for rational safety resource distribution from a supply chain perspective.