Operational Resilience Assessment of Multimodal Container Ports: A Systematic Sensitivity Analysis

Evaluations of port operational resilience currently focus on risks from individual components and/or sub-systems as an isolated entity, often overlooking the ripple effects across the components (e.g. the various transportation modes) within a port.Essential components such as liner shipping, feeder shipping, railways, and trucking form the operational backbone of a multimodal container port.As port functionality becomes more complicated to meet the development of new technologies, the need to accurately assess, measure, and sustain port operational resilience has intensified.However, the ripple effect of disruptions poses significant challenges in assessing this from a global systematic perspective.In response, a resilience assessment framework is newly designed specifically for multimodal container ports.This framework comprises four main elements: a System Dynamics (SD) simulation for simulating the operations of a multimodal container port; a resilience quantification model that translates system performance into a resilience metric based on three key criteria; an Evidential Reasoning (ER) based evaluation model that aggregates the resilience of various subsystems into an overall port resilience level; and a Global Sensitivity Analysis (GSA) technique, which employs Sobol sampling and Sobol sensitivity analysis to quantify the impact degree of both individual and combined disruptions.A series of disruptive scenarios, informed by historical failures and field investigations, are investigated to quantify port resilience extent at different levels to guide the rational countermeasure development.The experimental findings highlight the impact of traffic congestion, yard crane incidents, and liner quay crane accidents on port resilience.It is also evident that most significant disruptions are not formed by failures from individual components at a local level; rather, they interact with each other, causing ripple effect.This framework, for the first time to the authors' best knowledge, offers crucial insights for bolstering long-term resilience in container port operations from an overall port systematic perspective.