Resilience Assessment of the Railway Container Transport Service Network: A Two-Stage Model

To explore the ability of the railway container transport service network to cope with disturbance events, this study focuses on the network resilience. A network performance metric, termed network economic efficiency, is proposed, and a resilience assessment metric based on cumulative network performance is defined. A two-stage model is established to assess the network resilience. The first stage involves an optimization model for the railway container transport service network. The goal is to minimize the total transportation costs for containers across all routes. The model determines the train organization and container flow allocation schemes. The second stage is a resilience assessment model. The model uses the container flow allocation and the transportation costs on each route obtained in the first stage to assess the resilience value of the network. To validate the effectiveness of the two-stage model, a test network is designed, and the impact of a freezing rain event on the network is simulated. Results indicate that: (1) The disturbance event causes the network economic efficiency to drop to its lowest (81.1% of normal level) on the third day. The resilience value reaches its lowest (0.876) on the fourth day, recovering to 0.913 by the seventh day. (2) Increased transport demand hinders resilience recovery. As the transport demand coefficient increases from 0.5 to 1.1, the resilience value decreases from 0.8812 to 0.8745 on the fourth day. (3) The resilience decreases as the intensity of freezing rain increases. The lowest resilience values under light, moderate, and severe freezing rain are 0.8948, 0.8762, and 0.8574, respectively. This research provides a theoretical foundation and methodological support for assessing the resilience of the railway container transport service network.