Disruption and Resilience Issues in Freight Transportation

Abstract

Freight transportation is crucial to the lifeline of modern society because it connects the producers to geographically dispersed consumers. In North America, this connection is facilitated by an extensive freight transportation system comprised of surface, marine and air transportation. Given its’ significance to the economy, smooth and efficient functioning of the transportation sector is crucial for two reasons. First, investment in transportation infrastructure has not kept pace with the increased volume of goods, which in turn has resulted in at or near capacity operation for the freight transport sector. Second, risks from disruptions that are intentionally designed to damage or cripple the transportation system such as a terrorist related event or result from naturally occurring weather based events have increased. This seminar will focus on the latter reason, and introduce intentional and random disruptions followed by an outline of an analytical approach for fortifying rail-truck intermodal terminal network against the first type. The rest of the seminar time will focus on managing (random) disruption in a railroad network. An optimization-based methodology for recovery from random disruptions in service legs and train services in a railroad network will be outlined, wherein a predictive model is used to identify critical disruption factors and to design suitable mitigation strategy. The proposed methodology is applied to a case study built using the realistic infrastructure of a railroad network in United States. The resulting analyses underscore the importance of accepting a slight increase in pre-disruption transportation costs because it in turn will enhance network resiliency by building dis-similar paths for train services, and of installing alternative links around critical service legs.