Facilitating uncertainty treatment in the risk assessment of container supply chains

Over the last few years there has been a growing international recognition that Container Supply Chains (CSCs) contribute to economic prosperity. But they are uniquely vulnerable to many risks caused by both the traditional hazards, such as physical breaches in the integrity of shipments and the newly rising threats associated with pirate and terrorist attacks. To allow better understanding and control of the risks, it is necessary for the stakeholders to proactively assess the chains’ security and safety in advance, or reactively discover risks after a detrimental event occurs. This paper explores the various CSC risks, identifies common themes, and deals with the corresponding uncertainties by developing two novel risk modelling methods. One is to develop a fuzzy evidential reasoning approach for carrying out the security estimation of a vulnerable port system against terrorism attacks and the other is to produce a Bayesian network decision support tool for identifying vulnerable assets in a port security protection scenario. Consequently, the methods can be used to assemble and process subjective risk information on different aspects of a container transport system from multiple experts in a systematic way. Outcomes of the models can also provide decision makers with a transparent tool to evaluate CSC safety and security policy options for a specific scenario in a cost-effective manner.