Maritime port network resiliency and reliability through co-opetition

Abstract Local and global economies are for many nations highly dependent on the import and export of goods. These goods are shipped through global intermodal (IM) freight land-water transportation systems that rely on truck, rail and maritime networks and their IM terminals. These terminals are crucial to creating and maintaining efficient international trade routes. This paper considers port reliability and resilience, as well as the role of ports in supporting a larger resilient maritime system. Specifically, stochastic, bi-level, game theoretic optimization models for assessing and improving the resiliency and reliability of the global port network are presented. Proposed models are devised for a set of independent ports with interacting investment problems for competitive, but potentially cooperative (co-opetitive) environments. Uncertainties in traversal times and port throughput capacities are accounted for by adopting a stochastic optimization method using expected or max-min functions to simultaneously hedge against the consequences of multiple possible future port-related disaster events. Alternative centralized, but stochastic formulations are also provided. This stochastic, co-opetitive methodology and alternative centralized methods fill an important gap in the maritime resiliency literature.