I-Corps: Software Platform for the Assessment and Measurement of Port Disruptions

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project may enable stakeholders to model the functional and economic impact of cross-organizational, inter-infrastructure disruptions to intermodal supply chain movements. The project directly addresses the need for more resilient supply chains. Just-in-time supply chains designed for efficiency can result in high-impact disruptions and motivate the need for stakeholders to understand economic losses on disruptions via secondary, operational effects on intermodal transportation networks.

Planning tools for resilient supply chain movements should employ holistic threat models that enable stakeholders to consider tradeoffs between infrastructure complexity and operational efficiencies. The algorithms and envisioned software platform will help stakeholders to apply emerging threats to their infrastructure, quantify potential impacts, and strategically invest for increased community resilience.

This I-Corps project integrates discrete-event simulation and network flow optimization to compute optimal, cost-minimizing vehicle and commodity flows through shipping ports. The simulation also reroutes goods based on non-linear costs and economic impacts. This optimization algorithm enhances the capabilities to capture capacity constraints and to model delays resulting from disrupted commodity movements.

Routing vehicles and commodities is a non-deterministic polynomial-time hardness problem. Existing approaches use time-expanded networks to model commodity movements, but they result in scalability issues for large practical instances. The proposed optimizer adopts a dynamic approach to model discrete times and introduces delay nodes and arcs to accommodate container movements.

The proposed optimizer also constrains per-unit-time flow rates of commodities (e.g. road capacity, crane rate) in a continuous-time framework, thus significantly enhancing scalability. The tool both estimates costs due to disruptions and finds least cost ways to effectively recover from or mitigate their impacts.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.