Enhancing Resilience Of Port-Hinterland Container Intermodal Network

The development of container transportation and container port industries guarantees the prosperity of world trade.Within the whole international container transportation chain,the landside part,namely,the port-hinterland container transportation network(PHCTN),takes more than half of the total cost.However,under the risk of unconventional emergency events(UEEs),the ability of PHCTNs being robust against and adaptive to potential disruptions is a pre-request to ensure the efficiency of the international container transportation.Besides,given that intermodal has advantages over all-road transportation in terms of cost,efficiency,and environmental protection,it thus is necessary and important to investigate the resilience enhancement problem in the context of port-hinterland container intermodal network(PHCIN).Specifically,this paper includes three sub-studies:(1)Pre-event PHCIN resilience enhancement study.Focusing on the pre-event period of man-made UEEs(MUEEs)and considering the complex business relationship between players in the PHCIN,this study adopts network game theory to investigate the influence of players' preventive investments on enhancing the network resilience.Based on the theoretical analyses and numerical experiments of Ningbo-Zhoushan Port case,some useful managerial implications on enhancing the network's resilience in the pre-event period are provided.(2)Post-event PHCIN resilience enhancement study.Focusing on the post-event period of UEEs,this study utilizes,from the perspective of shippers,integer programming method to investigate the influence of immediate recovery activities on the improvement of PHCIN resilience.This study then applies the resilience improvement model to the Gothenburg Port case in Sweden.Based on the data collected and numerical experiments conducted,this study provides some useful implications to enhance the resilience of PHCIN in the post-event period.(3)PHCIN resilience evaluation and optimization study.Focusing on the road-inland water shipping intermodal,this empirical study aims to comprehensively evaluate the resilience of a PHCIN under the threat of natural UEEs(NUEEs).Specifically,it first proposes a resilience evaluation framework(REF),whose validity is verified by a group of REAL academic and industrial experts.Then,the REF is applied to two PHCINs in China along Yangtze and Zhujiang river systems.By collecting primary and secondary data,this study creatively adopts the ER-AHP method to have the two networks' resilience comparatively evaluated,from which useful managerial and policy implications on resilience optimization are provided.The theoretical originalities and practical contributions of this paper are as follows.First,this paper investigates the resilience of both road-rail and road-inland water shipping PHCINs under the threats of both MUEEs and NUEEs.It not only makes a contribution to the port-hinterland transportation system research,but also widens the application of resilience concept,filling up the research gap in this important field.Second,this paper proposes the "split first,and combine after" method to systematically investigate the targeted research question.Specifically,it first has the resilience enhancement problem discussed separately in the pre-event and post-event periods from the strategic and operational levels,respectively.Then,it comprehensively analyzes the resilience enhancemnet problem based on an empirical resilience evaluation sub-study.Third,the methodological originality of the paper lies in that,1)this paper is the first to apply the network game theory to investigate the influence of players' complex business relationships on PHCIN's resilience;2)it creatively constructs the post-event resilience improvement model from the perspective of shippers;and 3)it creatively proposes the ER-AHP method to empirically evaluate the resilience of PHCINs.Finally,in terms of practical contributions,with theoretical and empirical results,this paper can provide the private companies,public authorities and network planners with managerial and policy insights on enhancing and optimizing the resilience of PHCINs.