Resilience assessment: Insights from port community structures across the global container shipping network

Assessing resilience of the Global Container Shipping Network (GCSN) is crucial for bolstering its preparedness against various disruptions. Despite the growing prominence of regionalization within the GCSN, the precise impact mechanism of this trend on network resilience remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, this study introduces a new methodology for assessing the GCSN resilience from a community-based perspective. Initially, a directed-weighted GCSN is constructed utilizing global container shipping service data, facilitating the fine-grained identification of overlapping community structures through Symmetric Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (SNMF). Subsequently, six innovative community-based resilience metrics are devised, accounting for network directionality and link weight, thereby enabling a reliable assessment of community networks' capacity to maintain both connection efficiency and extent across different community dimensions. Various disruption scenarios, incorporating different disruption dimensions, attacked port characteristics, and disruption types, are designed to thoroughly evaluate community resilience. Experimental results reveal that 10 identified communities maintain strong intra-community connections but are highly vulnerable to disruptions at intra-community hub ports. These disruptions potentially lead to significant resilience degradation and network collapse, especially under targeted cumulative attacks. Consequently, this research contributes new insights into the mechanisms of community-based shipping network resilience and informs strategic decision-making to mitigate various disruption risks.