A Bayesian Network risk model for estimating coastal maritime transportation delays following an earthquake in British Columbia

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ress.2021.107708Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Natural disasters can lead to maritime transport disruptions to coastal communities

  • A Bayesian Network model is developed to estimate maritime transport delays

  • The model is specific to the coastal areas of British Columbia in an earthquake context

  • The model can be used for multi-modal logistics in disaster preparedness risk management

Abstract

Coastal communities are vulnerable to the consequences of disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis. Often, such communities are heavily dependent on maritime transportation for the ingress of essential goods such as food, fuel, and medicine. Major natural disasters can cause damage to critical infrastructures, causing disruptions to logistics chains and delays in the delivery of essential goods to vulnerable coastal communities. Estimating such delays is an important aspect of disaster preparedness planning, as it can support community-focused risk mitigating policies, improve emergency response operations, and help identify resilience strategies. In this article, a Bayesian Network risk model is developed for estimating the delays in maritime transportation to island communities in British Columbia, resulting from a major earthquake in the region. The model takes a regional scope and is primarily expert-driven. Correspondingly, it uses information about the earthquake intensity, infrastructure damages, impacts on shipping operations, and community needs to estimate delay times of the operability of different shipping services in the region under various scenarios. The model is illustrated through a series of hypothetical scenarios. Various validation tests furthermore indicate an adequate model performance for supporting regional disaster preparedness planning for the immediate response phase following an earthquake.

Introduction

Coastal and especially island communities are comparatively more vulnerable to the immediate impacts and ensuing consequences of disasters, because their comparative geographical remoteness leads to isolation from major population centres and logistics hubs [40]. With the increasingly clearly manifesting effects of climate change, many coastal and island communities are particularly endangered through more frequently occurring hurricanes, floods, storm surges, and other forms of catastrophic devastation [47].

Various coastal populations are heavily or exclusively dependent on maritime transportation for the ingress of essential goods, such as food, oil and medicine [41]. Natural disasters can cause significant damage to critical infrastructures and/or lead to cascading technological accidents. When port or other critical maritime transportation infrastructures are damaged, delivery of goods through maritime logistics chains may be severely hampered for extended periods of time. Even with less destructive natural disasters, operational disruptions in the maritime transportation system can lead to delays in deliveries of essential goods such as fuel or medical supplies to coastal areas, see e.g. Tanner et al. [56] and Errett et al. [23].

For effective emergency response, fast deployment of humanitarian relief logistics and distribution of essential supplies to affected populations in coastal communities is essential. This is evident from the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which had devastating impacts on the port infrastructure in the region, and had severe repercussions to all transportation modes in the region [34]. Another example is the Great Tohoku Tsunami in 2011, which damaged many coastal ports in Japan [58], led to significant transportation disruptions over a large area [55], and led to an estimated economic loss of US$200–300 billion [20].

Several studies have already focused on aspects of maritime transportation disruption, focusing on understanding the impacts of contextual factors, or on proposing strategies to minimize the impacts of disruptions. For example, Gurning et al. [31] provide an analysis of causes and mitigation strategies for disruptions to a maritime supply chain linking Australia and Indonesia. Qu and Meng [53] provide an extreme-scenario economic analysis of shipping disruptions in the Malacca and Singapore Straits, whereas Calatayud et al. [10] analyse the vulnerability of international freight flows to disruptions through a network analysis. Hossain et al. [35] developed a model for assessing the resilience of a port to disruption scenarios. This was extended in Hossain et al. [36] to the interdependencies between the port and its surrounding supply chain network.

In disaster risk management contexts, significant advances have been made in developing location and routing models for humanitarian logistics, mostly focusing on road transportation, see Banomyong et al. [5] and Behl and Dutta [6] for recent reviews. In comparison, work focusing on maritime transportation in a disaster logistics context is relatively scarce. Tatham and Kovacs [57] provide a cost analysis of floating warehouses for disaster logistics to coastal communities, while Wilberg and Olafsen [61] propose a simulation model for assessing the effectiveness of disaster logistics using this seabasing concept. Ozkapici et al. [50] develop a multimodal humanitarian logistics model for the Istanbul area, which includes maritime transportation, to minimize the total transportation time of relief goods to affected communities. Costa et al. [15] propose an object-oriented model for the vulnerability of the fuel distribution network in British Columbia, whereas Chang and Dowlatabadi [12] propose a modelling framework for informing decision making for disaster resilience, focused on coastal shipping.

Understanding plausible delays in the delivery of critical goods, such as fuel, medicine, and food to affected communities is an important aspect of natural disaster preparedness and response risk management [1]. In models for road transport, maritime, and multi-modal disaster logistics, such as the models reviewed in Behl and Dutta [6] and Banomyong et al. [5], and the models by Ozkapici et al. [50] and Costa et al. [15] mentioned above, the duration of the transportation operation delay and the delivery time to affected communities are important parameters, but in these existing models, the values for delays are based mostly on assumptions and high-level judgments.

Hence, there are currently no models available which specifically focus on the delays of maritime transportation due to disruptions caused by natural or NaTech disasters. For the island and coastal communities in British Columbia, which are heavily dependent on maritime transportation, the provincial natural disaster preparedness planning highlights a need to gain better understanding of maritime transportation disruptions and delivery delays [52]. This is especially necessary for disaster risk management for earthquakes, as these occur relatively frequently in the region, with possibly devastating effects [37].

Given the geographically divergent impacts of earthquakes and the different shipping operations in the province, it is desirable that such a model is capable of estimating route delays for a range of scenarios to support region-wide disaster preparedness planning. Furthermore, there often are considerable uncertainties involved in anticipating the particular aspects of NaTech disasters and disaster risk management [22, 54]. Therefore, explicitly accounting for uncertainty in making estimates of such maritime transportation delays caused by earthquake impacts is considered important.

Considering the above, this paper aims to develop a model to estimate the maritime transportation delays to coastal communities in British Columbia caused by an earthquake in the region. To account for the uncertainties, a Bayesian Network (BN) modelling approach is selected, which is further contextualized in a strength of evidence and criticality assessment, which provide information to model users about the evidence base of the model when estimating delays for specific routes. To build a knowledge base for the model development, various evidence gathering activities are executed and reported.

The remainder of this article is organized as follows. In Section 2, the research context is described, providing high-level insights in the maritime transportation system in British Columbia, and earthquakes as the most significant class of natural disasters in that region. Section 3 describes the methodology used for developing the proposed model for maritime transportation delays. Specifically, the choice of BN modelling is justified and briefly explained, and the process for establishing the knowledge base, model development, and model validation is described. In Section 4, the proposed BN model is shown, results of illustrative scenarios are given, and a model validation presented. A discussion is given in Section 5, focusing on the model use, limitations of the presented work, and future research directions. Section 6 concludes.

Section snippets

Research context

As a research context in the current work, Vancouver Island is selected, which is the largest and most populated island in British Columbia, Canada. All communities on this island are heavily dependent on the marine transportation system for receiving essential goods such as foods, fuels and medical supplies. The maritime transportation network to coastal communities on Vancouver Island can be characterized as a short sea shipping hub-and-spoke network, where essential goods are delivered from

Adopted risk perspective and model development process

In this section, the process for developing the proposed model is described. In Section 3.1, the choice for Bayesian Networks as the selected modelling approach is justified, and BNs are contextualized in a two-stage risk analysis framework based on an uncertainty-based risk perspective. The model development process is explained in Section 3.2.

Results

A summary of the main aspects of the background knowledge underlying the final developed model is given in Section 4.1. The actual BN model is presented in Section 4.2. For reasons of brevity, focus here is on the qualitative part of the model, i.e. the graphical component representing the variables and their relations. The discretization of the probabilistic component is outlined as well, whereas for detailed information about the variable states and the probability values for CPTs associated

Discussion

Referring to the two-stage risk analysis framework by Goerlandt and Montewka [28] and the acceptable uses of non-predictive models as suggested by Hodges [33] and Goerlandt and Reniers [30], the developed risk model should not be used as a direct estimate of the delay times for specific routes. Rather, it is recommended to use these estimated delays as a basis for reflection, discussion, and final expert judgment for specific maritime routes in the study area. Hence, the BN model should be seen

Conclusions

In this article, a Bayesian Network risk model is developed to estimate delays of coastal maritime transportation in British Columbia under earthquake conditions. The model considers a range of earthquake conditions, routes, and vessel type, providing high-level insights especially in the relative differences between delays under various scenarios. Several validation tests are performed on the developed model, indicating a plausible representation of the model space and adequate changes of the

Author statement

Floris Goerlandt: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Samsul Islam: Methodology, Software, Formal Analysis, Data curation, Writing – original draft

Declaration of Competing Interest

I confirm that no conflict of interest exits in the submission of this manuscript. I also confirm that the work is original, has not been published previously, and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, in whole or in part.

Acknowledgements

The work presented in this paper has been performed in context of the project ‘Shipping Resilience: Strategic Planning for Coastal Community Resilience to Marine Transportation Risk (SIREN)’. This project is financially supported by the Marine Observation, Prediction and Response (MEOPAR) Network of Centres of Excellence, and by Province of British Columbia. This financial support is gratefully acknowledged. The authors are also grateful for the kind support by the domain experts throughout the

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