Assessing the efficiency and vulnerability of global liner shipping network

Abstract

Global liner shipping network (GLSN) constitutes an essential part of global maritime supply chains, but it could be vulnerable to disruptions. This paper develops an integrated framework for assessing the efficiency and vulnerability of GLSN. Specifically, a novel efficiency metric is proposed to quantify the performance of GLSN, and the framework enables modeling different levels of port disruption scenarios. Results show that the overall GLSN is quite robust under the partial disruption scenario of any single port (or of any single country's ports), but the damage to different countries is highly heterogeneous. Under dismantling scenarios where the identified most critical ports (countries) are successively disrupted, the GLSN vulnerability increases non-linearly with an increasing level of disruption. Our findings demonstrate that it is necessary to monitor and protect the identified critical ports (countries); especially, avoiding their simultaneously complete disruptions is of vital importance to the robust functionality of GLSN.