Port Resilience Research Articles

Prioritizing port resilience drivers and strategies: a case study of Chilean ports

ABSTRACT Disruptive events increasingly challenge global port operations and infrastructure, emphasizing the need for robust resilience plans to maintain operational continuity during crises. Designing effective resilience strategies in port operations involves prioritizing key drivers and strategies by establishing a hierarchical structure and analyzing their systemic interactions. This paper proposes a methodology to prioritize resilience drivers with its strategies by considering multiple key port stakeholders. This approach aims to create a roadmap for implementing these drivers, providing ports with a comprehensive tool for planning and executing resilience strategies. The methodology integrates the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) with Interpretative Structural Modeling (ISM). To illustrate its development, a case study focusing on two primary stakeholders, terminals and port authorities, in the Chilean port context is presented. The findings reveal that the main resilience strategies in Chilean ports include remote access to information by port authorities, alternative transport modes for port access and exit, rescheduling dispatches and cargo reception by port terminals, communication and call chains of the port authority, and remote access to information by port terminals. These results offer practical implications for port operations, providing clear guidance for implementing resilience strategies.

Dynamic resilience analysis of the liner shipping network: From structure to cooperative mechanism

Liner shipping networks play a vital role in global and regional trade. However, they are susceptible to damage from unexpected interruptions, which can trigger dynamic cascading failures and undermine the system’s resilience. To address this challenge, we propose a novel cascading failure model for liner shipping networks that considers the characteristics of the network structure and port functions. First, we design two load redistribution methods that rely on network topology and employ a cooperative mechanism for coordination. This cooperative mechanism aims to balance the benefits for carriers and shippers by effectively controlling losses. Subsequently, we develop three metrics—network congestion rate, failure rate, and shipper loss—to assess the resilience of the network during cascading failures. To verify the impact of the cooperative mechanism, we apply the proposed methods to the China-Europe liner shipping network. Through simulations involving various port failures and resistance levels, we analyze the effectiveness of the cooperative mechanism. The results demonstrate that redistributing the load to downstream ports within the network effectively mitigates deep cascading failures. Additionally, the implementation of a port cooperative mechanism enhances resilience in the face of uncertainties by safeguarding crucial ports within the network and significantly reducing shipper losses. When port resistance is low, the cooperative mechanism reduces shipper losses by nearly half and lowers the average congestion rate. Although port reserve capacity can resist cascading failures, it falls short in the face of severe disruptions. In such cases, the cooperative mechanism compensates for capacity shortages, enhancing port resilience at a low cost. This study contributes to combating and minimizing cascading congestion in liner shipping networks, offering valuable insights for risk prevention and management strategies for ports and shipping companies. It also has implications for yield management and policy decisions from a network perspective.

Government policies on port resilience amid strike events—A two-stage Van Damme based tripartite evolutionary game

In contrast to natural phenomena, such as extreme weather, accidents, disasters, and public health emergencies, labor strikes are human-induced emergent circumstances arising from low real wages in most cases. During disputes with ports, the labor typically exerts control over the duration and scale of strikes to negotiate improved benefits, while port authorities may seek collaboration with neighboring ports to enhance resilience and mitigate transportation disruption risks. Should the government participate as a third party in the game as an indirect stakeholder? The government must assess the necessity of engagement in the first stage and select an appropriate strategy in the second. Within the framework of tripartite equilibrium, this study examines the evolutionary paths of stability points, dual-stable states, and unstable states under different government engagement policies, as well as the influence of each factor on the tripartite strategy choice. The results reveal that (1) the right timing and policies for government engagement can mitigate more than half of the damage from the strike to the overall system; (2) port alliances can speed up 50 % of the evolution time of the labor to terminate the strike; (3) the government will play the dominant role when the risk of the strike to labor is increased; and (4) the expected duration of strikes can have an inverted “U”-shaped effect on port strategies but a “U”-shaped effect on government policies. The application of the two-stage evolutionary game model in this study develops an analytical framework that provides better reference for the government’s actual decision-making.

Adaptation planning of container ports in the context of typhoon risks: The case of Ningbo-Zhoushan port in China

This study conducts a comprehensive survey of the risk of typhoon to container ports by assessing the risk level of typhoons in China's major container ports, predicting their economic losses, and evaluating corresponding adaptation measures. It analyzes adaptation measures in response to typhoon impacts, with a case study of Ningbo-Zhoushan port, one of China's most representative regional ports. It identifies the inadequate supply of institutions and the absence and misbehavior of the main port stakeholders as the main cause of varying institutional imperfections in the port adaptation system. This study contributes to the development of efficient port typhoon prevention policies, reduction of economic losses and casualties, and improvement of port operational efficiency. It also fills an important research gap on climate risk and adaptation in China's container ports, with an emphasis in enhancing port resilience.

Resilience of regional container port network: based on projection correlation and dynamic spatial Markov Chain

ABSTRACT Ports are interconnected by shipping routes within the global logistics network. Shocks and risks stemming from financial crises, epidemics, ecology, and so on have prompted shifts in cross-border labor division towards regional cooperation, reflecting an ‘anti-globalization’ trend. Despite these dynamics, few studies have analyzed the spatial structure and dynamic evolution of resilience within regional container port network. Addressing this gap, this study considers spatial and dynamic attributes to identify influential factors of resilience and introduces the concept of spatial lag-multidimensional resistance (SL-MR) to strengthen the understanding and cognition of regional container port network resilience (RCPNR). By ports in Tianjin and Hebei, China, it constructs a dynamic spatial Markov chain (DSMC) based on the projection correlation (PC index) to dissect transition trajectories amid financial crises and other conflicts. The findings indicate: (1) The regional container port network often experiences a low-level path dependence like ‘poverty trap.’ (2) Hierarchical spatial lags significantly influence the transition probability of container port network resilience degradation, with regional port relationships being unidirectional rather than cooperative. (3) The impact of the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic on regional port resilience varies, serving as key determinants in shaping diverse resilience types.

Data-driven approach for port resilience evaluation

As pivotal nodes in international trade, ports have faced unprecedented challenges, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. From the perspective of port congestion, this study investigates port resilience based on a quantitative approach. Port resilience is specifically evaluated using five novel metrics derived from resilience capacities and port congestion indexes, employing data-driven approaches, which are then applied to analyze nine global ports across six regions. The findings of the study indicate that: 1) The ports of Southampton and Shanghai display better resilience levels, whereas New York/New Jersey and Los Angeles/Long Beach show poorer resilience performance during the research period. 2) Ports in West Coast North America demonstrate relatively low resilience levels, while those in South East Asia showcase superior resilience. 3) The changing dynamics and evolution of port resilience rankings across different years underscore the multifaceted nature of port resilience and its capacity to adapt to external factors such as global events. Our study emphasizes the importance of quantifying port resilience, with a specific focus on port congestion. It provides valuable insights that have significant implications for port management and disaster preparedness within the maritime industry.

Evaluating impacting factors of economic resilience across major Japan port cities

Japan relies heavily on its port cities for global economic integration and societal support, given its extensive coastline. These ports handle most of the country’s imports, including the majority of its energy needs and more than half of its food requirements, being pivotal in urban economic resilience and sustainability. However, the COVID-19 pandemic, posed severe challenges to these ports by disrupting maritime trade, thereby impacting economic stability. Given that, this study explores the development dynamics of Japanese port cities during the pandemic, using data from 2020. We assessed how these cities have coped with the pandemic’s challenges, focusing on factors that influence port resilience. Port cities are reclassified based on their economic robustness during the pandemic, along with features including demographics, urban infrastructure, and port capacity. In this way, key factors for enhancing urban economic resilience are identified, prompting sustainable development strategies for Japan’s port cities.

Dynamic berth allocation under uncertainties based on deep reinforcement learning towards resilient ports

With the evolving global trade landscape and the post-pandemic effects, the resilience of ports has become paramount. The unforeseen disturbances bring substantial challenges, especially in berth allocation, a vital task ensuring seamless resilient port operations. The unpredictability of vessel arrivals and the variability in loading/unloading times intensify these issues, pushing traditional static allocation methods beyond their limits. Fortunately, the advent of smart ports has led in an era of big data availability, enabling the application of advanced deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques. To capitalize on this shift, this research presents a DRL-based methodology specially designed to solve the berth allocation problem with the uncertainties in vessel arrival and container handling time to enhance port resilience. A Markov Decision Process model (MDP) of the berth allocation problem is established to minimize the mean waiting time with tailored state space, rule-based action space, and reward function to address the issue. An offline training method is designed to train the agent in selecting the optimal action based on the current state of the port berth system at each decision point even in uncertain environments, deep Q-network (DQN) is implemented for this problem. Comprehensive experiments across different problem scales are conducted to validate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed method in solving berth allocation challenges under uncertain conditions. Furthermore, the trained model also performs better than other methods in different vessel congestion levels through learning.

Intra-port demand coordination and inter-port competition: Ports’ pricing strategies with congestion concerns

In practice, mix hub ports operate to satisfy both the hinterland demand and transshipment demand, which increases the processing workload, triggers the congestion concern, and hence weakens the port resilience. Note that the port capacity is limited, so decision-makers need to cautiously determine the service prices to coordinate exclusive hinterland demand with competing transshipment demand within the port capacity limit when competing with the other ports. This research formulates a mix hub port's key trade-offs in the pricing strategy choice, that is, whether to charge a uniform service price or two different service prices for the two kinds of demand. The finding of this study shows that the congestion concern (port resilience) plays a key role in determining ports' pricing strategies. And the intensified competition in transshipment demand induces the port to favor the uniform pricing strategy, especially when the hinterland demand potential is sufficiently large. Interestingly, the ports may be trapped in a Prisoner's Dilemma where the differentiated pricing strategy arises as the equilibrium, but they are actually better off under the uniform pricing strategy.

Assessment of port resilience using Bayesian network: A study of strategies to enhance readiness and response capacities

Ports, as critical infrastructure, are a crucial part of the maritime transportation system (MTS) and are increasingly vulnerable to disturbances and disasters in the post-pandemic era. Resilience plays a crucial role in building sustainable infrastructure, and developing a resilient port system is a priority in planning and developing MTS. This paper aims to develop measures to enhance port resilience that can cope with risks and uncertainties. A circular four-stage method is proposed to study port resilience. The major disturbances that are currently affecting ports are summarized and classified. Then, a port resilience assessment model using the Bayesian network is proposed, in which various resilience strategies are categorized into different metrics to assess resilience capabilities (i.e. readiness and response capacities). The model is constructed based on expert judgment and statistical analysis. The Shanghai Yangshan Deepwater Port in China is used as a case study. The results show that natural disasters are major disruptors plaguing ports. The overall resilience of automated terminals is higher than that of non-automated terminals. Strategies to enhance visibility, such as building real-time data management systems and data analysis programs, have the most significant impact on improving ports’ readiness. Strategies to enhance recovery such as facility restoration and technology restoration are the most important when improving ports’ response capability.

Port sustainability initiatives: a study of brazilian public ports

The paper aims to identify the environmental sustainability initiatives applied in Brazilian public ports. The survey was conducted with twenty port managers located along the Brazilian coast, and the results revealed that sustainability initiatives in Brazilian public ports are consistent with international practices. The study observed a trend in which ports integrate management indicators with sustainable development goals. Brazilian ports have demonstrated a commitment to publishing sustainability reports, although only eight ports currently use the GRI guidelines to prepare these reports. Therefore, there is room for improvement in aligning with international standards and improving external communication. Companies and stakeholders can compare sustainability reports more easily using a common international standard, facilitating benchmarking and identifying best practices. The enhancement of port resilience to the impacts of climate change requires continuous monitoring, and ports have access to various databases and tools for this purpose. According to the study, the most commonly used databases by the surveyed ports are meteorological/climatological and oceanographic/hydrological. Only 5% of all ports had green tariff incentives to reduce emissions in port regions. Furthermore, nearly 40% of all ports monitored CO2 emissions through emissions inventories, and only two ports employed solar energy. The paper outlines the main environmental sustainability initiatives in Brazilian public ports and provides insights for promoting more sustainable ports and cities.

Port resilience analysis based on the HHM-FCM approach under COVID-19

Ports are critical for global trade as they serve as essential gateways for the movement of cargo. To ensure uninterrupted transport services and minimize the impact of disruptive events, enhancing port resilience is of utmost importance. In this study, we developed a hybrid framework combining Hierarchical Holographic Modeling (HHM) with a fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) to analyze the interconnectedness of various factors that contribute to port resilience. Our significant contribution lies in adopting the “ship-port-cargo” perspective, which enabled us to effectively identify and filter relevant factors for enhancing port resilience. The results revealed that supply and demand balance, along with schedule reliability, are the most influential factors contributing to port resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposed method allows for the examination of both direct and indirect impacts, making network analysis and scenario simulations a valuable tool for studying the influence path. By leveraging this framework, port managers can make informed decisions to enhance port resilience and effectively mitigate the consequences of disruptive events.

Perceptions of the Relationship between Port Security Level, Resilience, Cargo Operational Performance, and Sustainability Performance among Korean Port Operators and Shipping Companies

Purpose – As globalization progresses, complexity also increases, and various factors that threaten port functions are emerging. Accordingly, the demand for port security to prevent the crisis and resilience that quickly recovers its original function after the crisis is also increasing in port operations. However, few studies have examined how to ensure the port security and how the resilience affects operation performance of port and sustainability performance as well. So the study aims to find out how port security affects port resilience and port operational performance, and consequently, this two factors affect socioeconomic and environmental sustainability performance respectively and synthetically. Design/methodology – Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was first performed to determine the validity of the factors of model and hypothesis test was performed using Structural Equation Model (SEM) to analyze the Port Performance Model, which show the perception logic among port security level, port resilience, operation performance, and sustainability performance. In order to empirically analyze this model, total 264 respondents from port security operators, shipping companies in South Korea were surveyed. Findings – As result of SEM, First, port security level positively affected the resilience (H1) and cargo operational performance (H2) but not in both of the sustainability performances (H3, H4). Second, resilience positively affected only cargo operational performance (H5) and socio-economic sustainability performance (H7). Last, cargo operation performance positively affects the both of sustainability performances (H8, H9). Originality/value – It was confirmed that port security could improve cargo operational performance through ensuring port resilience and eventually increase the socio-economic sustainability. Therefore the study implies that careful integration and management of port security, port resilience, and sustainability are required, along with compromise on sustainable development goals in the social, economic, and environmental area among all stakeholders.

Resilience Evaluation of Ports along the Maritime Silk Road from the Perspective of Investment and Construction

Since the establishment of the “Belt and Road” initiative, the investment and construction of ports along the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road have received extensive attention from the international community. The evaluation of ports is of great significance to investors’ investments and construction of ports around the world, so it is very necessary to establish a reasonable port evaluation system. At present, there are few studies on defining and evaluating port resilience, and the existing port evaluation index system has defects. Therefore, according to the similarity between cities and ports, this paper introduces the concept of “three-dimensional space” and the “system of systems” theory of cities and divides the resilience of ports along the Maritime Silk Road into three-dimensional spaces of “physical-society-information.” The CRITIC-entropy method and the TOPSIS method constructed a port resilience evaluation model along the Maritime Silk Road and quantitatively evaluated and analyzed the comprehensive resilience and subspatial resilience of 28 ports along the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. The results show that the route network port degree, the annual throughput of the port container, and the number of fixed broadband subscribers per 100 people are the key indicators that affect the port’s physical space resilience, social space resilience, and information space resilience. Also, coordinated physical, social, and information spatial resilience development plays a catalytic role in improving overall resilience. Therefore, the investment of ports along the Maritime Silk Road should adopt corresponding and more targeted investment plans according to the actual resilience of each port. The research provides new ideas and directions for investors to invest in port construction and has certain practical guiding significance for the increase of investors’ income and the sound development of the national economy.

Port resilience in the post-COVID-19 era

With the COVID-19 pandemic evitably becoming the “New Normality” and will continue to impact human society much longer than anticipated, it is essential to explore effective measures that global ports can take to adapt to unexpected challenges in the post-COVID-19 era. This paper builds a port resilience index system based on the entropy weight method from a multistakeholder's view. We utilize the port resilience index system for 22 major Chinese ports during 2020–2021. We further investigate the direct impact of port resilience on port governance performance. Our results indicate that resiliently-governed ports can guarantee higher port throughput while sustaining lower congestion when facing challenges from the global pandemic.

Multi-hazard risk to global port infrastructure and resulting trade and logistics losses

Despite their economic importance, the risk that ports face from multiple natural hazards has not yet been monetised on a global scale. Here, we perform an asset-level risk analysis of global port infrastructure from multiple hazards, quantifying the risk to physical asset damages and logistics services (i.e. port-specific risk) and maritime trade flows at-risk (i.e. trade risk). We find that 86% majority of ports are exposed to more than three hazards. Globally, port-specific risk totals 7.5 USD bn per year, with 32% of the risk attributed to tropical cyclone impacts. In addition, 63.1 USD bn of trade is at-risk every year, with trade risk as a fraction of total trade being particularly high in Small Island Developing States. Our result underline that port resilience is determined by various critical factors, such as engineering standards, operational thresholds, recovery duration, that vary widely across ports, requiring tailored solutions to improve port resilience.

Seaport Resilience Analysis and Throughput Forecast Using a Deep Learning Approach: A Case Study of Busan Port

The global nature of seaport operations makes shipping companies susceptible to potential impacts. Sustainability requires seaport authorities to understand the underlying mechanisms of resilience in a dynamic world, to ensure high performance under disruptions. This paper deals with data analytics for analysing port resilience and a new paradigm for productivity forecasting that utilize a hybrid deep learning method. Nonlinear analytical methods include Lyapunov exponent, entropy analysis, Hurst exponent, and historical event analysis, with statistical significance tests. These approaches have been utilised to show that throughput demand at Busan port (South Korea) exhibits complex behaviour due to business volatility. A new forecasting method based on long short-term memory (LSTM) and random forest (RF) has been applied to explore port throughput in realizing recovery policy. The LSTM networks have shown high effectiveness in time-series forecasting tasks; RF is proposed as a complementary method to mitigate residual errors from the LSTM scheme. Statistical significance tests have been conducted to comprehensively evaluate the introduced forecasting models. The results show that the hybrid method outperformed three benchmarked models in both the short- and long-term forecasting at a 95% confidence level, guaranteeing accuracy and robustness as well as suitability. As a seeking strategy for seaport competitiveness, novel resilience planning incorporates sustainability to prepare for disruptions such as a global pandemic.

Towards a model of port-based resilience against fisher labour exploitation

Fishers have pronounced vulnerabilities to labour exploitation and modern slavery. Regulatory efforts to mitigate fisher labour exploitation through domestic modern slavery legislation, and through the ratification and implementation of The International Labour Organization’s Work in Fishing Convention (C188) have had varying success. This heterogeneity is mainly because the implementation of C188 rests upon ratified states enforcing aligned domestic legislation, and rests also on the supposition that each port state has the resources and capacity to implement these standards within its port networks through enforcement levers and agencies often with varying operational reach and with overlapping jurisdictions. In practice, C188 applies messily and variably in ports. Increasingly ports are cast as fulcrums for addressing labour abuses in fishing, yet policies have struggled to connect together the needs of individual fishers with relevant port structures and services in a meaningful and actionable way. This paper advances a conceptual model for conducting a port-by-port analysis of port communities by appraising site-based assets and dynamics. With this understanding, a port-based and place-specific account of fisher vulnerability and resilience can be constructed. This analysis also considers how regulatory coverage and enforcement can be supplemented by the operationalisation of a multi-factored, multi-scalar consideration of risk determinants. Together this dynamic asset and liability-based model of port resilience can better reflect the variability of port enforcement, capacity, and infrastructure to more effectively assess fisher labour exploitation and identify pathways for improved enforcement.

Green port oriented resilience improvement for traffic-power coupled networks

Under the green ports initiative, port operations rely more on electric power. However, the power system is vulnerable to disruptions. Its ability to resist disruption seriously affects port resilience, which is related to the port operation’s level and performance. To maintain a resilient port, its infrastructure needs to be well designed and coordinated to prevent or reduce losses from disruptions. Therefore, some policies are proposed to improve port resilience under various disruption scenarios by focusing on the traffic-electric power coupled system and optimizing the planning level and operational level decisions. A two-stage, stochastic, and nonlinear mathematical programming model is established to model systems’ interaction and describe the impacts of preparedness and recovery actions with the objective of maximizing port resilience under a certain budget. The experimental results show that the improved coupled system can greatly improve the port resilience. In addition, the resilience of the port can also be improved by optimizing the investment in the power network and the equipment scheduling in the container transportation network. Some forward-looking managerial implications have been revealed.

Socioeconomic impacts of resilience to seaport and highway transportation network disruption

• An integrated transportation-socioeconomic impact model is developed and applied. • Aggregate and distributional impacts of port-transportation disruptions are simulated. • Resilience tactics can substantially reduce potential GDP losses. • Losses from port disruptions increase income inequality . • Port resilience tactics reduce inequality from port disruptions. An integrated transportation-socioeconomic model is developed to analyze the economic consequences of and resilience to seaport and associated transportation network disruptions. Since such disruptions can affect people in a region unequally, the model is constructed to analyze both aggregate economic impacts and impacts across socioeconomic groups. We illustrate the model’s usefulness in a simulated earthquake scenario affecting the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Total GDP losses from port disruptions, highway transportation cost increases, and general building damages, working through regional and interregional supply-chains, are estimated at $24.2 billion in the Port Region and $30.2 billion in the U.S. as a whole. A combination of several resilience tactics is estimated to reduce GDP impacts by 41.3% in LA and 57.6% in the U.S. The distributional analysis indicates the extent to which lower-to-middle-income groups are more proportionally impacted by port disruptions and middle-to-higher-income groups are more impacted by building damages.