The global container shipping network is vital to international trade. Current techniques for its vulnerability assessment are constrained due to the lack of historical disruption data and computational limitations due to typical network sizes. We address these modelling challenges by developing a new framework, composed by game-theoretic attacker-defender model and a cost-based container assignment model that can identify systemic vulnerabilities in the network. Our analysis illustrates the differences in vulnerability and port criticality rankings with different disruption magnitudes. Model outputs are used to establish performance baselines and to assess the effectiveness of component-level interventions seeking to increase network resilience.
Citation
Centre for Transport Studies, Imperial College London, May 2018