Resilience Framework for Ports and Other Intermodal Components

Abstract

Intermodal (IM) freight systems and their components play a significant role in the U.S. and world economies. Terminals and ports are critical components of these systems. These components however, are, by the nature of their design inherently vulnerable to natural and terrorist attack, and evidence is mounting that an attack on or involving the IM freight transport system and its components would have catastrophic consequences. Significant effort has been expended on the development of technologies and other measures that can aid in addressing these security needs at ports in the United States and abroad. A quantitative measure, termed resilience, is employed to determine the best set of actions to improve security at nodal facilities in an IM network. Resilience accounts for both the innate reliability of a facility and the ability of short-term recovery actions to mitigate negative effects. This concept has been employed at the system level. A framework for its application at the IM component level is proposed. A case-based analysis is conducted to produce the specific steps required to apply this concept to an existing port. The framework is general and can be applied to any IM nodal component, such as terminals, marshalling yards, and border control stations. The resulting ability to quantify the component's level of vulnerability will aid decision makers in assessing trade-offs between investment and costly security implementations.

Operational Models of Infrastructure Resilience

“…Reed et al (67) present resilience scoring metrics and build on the work of Haimes (58) in using input-output models to measure the resilience of interconnected systems. These ideas have been prevalent in the civil engineering literature, particularly in assessing the resilience of freight transportation (68,69) and its dependence on maritime systems, (70,71) with emphasis to evaluate the resilience of transportation networks after a disaster. (72,73) Using ideas from control theory, Vugrin et al (74) characterize resilience in terms of the deviation (both magnitude and duration) from "normal" operation that follows a disruptive event; in this context, a system is more resilient if it experiences smaller deviations.…”

A Mathematical Framework for Quantifying and Optimizing Protective Actions for Civil Infrastructure Systems

“…They proposed a stochastic programming formulation of the problem and exact solution technique based on Benders decomposition, column generation, and Monte Carlo simulation. This resilience concept was applied in Nair et al () to improve security at nodal facilities within intermodal freight networks. Miller‐Hooks et al () extended this concept to include pre‐event preparedness actions and investigated potential synergies between pre‐ and postevent investments to improve system resilience.…”

Stochastic Measures of Network Resilience: Applications to Waterway Commodity Flows

“…For example, Rose describes dynamic recoverability as related to “the speed at which an entity or system recovers from a severe shock to achieve a desired state.” While there are many studies related to this area (e.g., socioecological resilience, sociotechnical resilience), most work is oriented toward lessons learned and management results that are generally unquantifiable. Moreover, except for several analyses of intermodal freight systems, there is a void in research related to the stochastic behavior of recovery in general infrastructure networks.…”