Resilience Analysis of Container Port Networks based on Motif Dynamics

Disruptions in maritime shipping may cause significant burdens and damage to local and global businesses. Considering the increasing connections and dynamics in maritime port operations for global maritime shipping, it is important to study the resilience of port networks in order to better mitigate disruption risks. Considering the growing interconnections and dynamics in maritime port operations within the global maritime shipping industry, it becomes crucial to study the resilience of port networks. However, a lot of network research tends to focus on big-picture viewpoints, sometimes missing the hidden processes that make real-world networks resilient and able to bounce back from disruptions. Networks that look similar when viewed from a broad perspective can actually be quite different when zooming in on motifs, which are small sections of a network involving multiple nodes and often seen as a basic building block of networks. Hence, This paper presents a motif-based method for studying the resilience of container port networks. Unlike methods that only look at the overall network structure, focusing on motifs can help to better understand local network structures and how they function. Our method is applied to two representative container port networks, centered at two Southeast Asian ports, respectively, with the aim of acquiring insights that are useful in real-world operations.