Maritime transport is a vital backbone of today’s global and complex supply chains. Unfortunately, the specific vulnerability of maritime supply chains has not been widely researched. This paper by Øyvind Berle, Bjørn Egil Asbjørnslett and James B Rice puts it right and presents a Formal Vulnerability Assessment of a maritime transportation system. This is not the first maritime paper that Asbjørnslett has contributed to on this blog, and he keeps up the good work he started in 2007, when he presented Coping with risk in maritime logistics at ESREL 2007.
Maritime transport – a forgotten part of supply chains?
I guess it is true that maritime transport or sea transport is an overlooked part of supply chains, even on this blog. In my more than 500 posts the word “maritime only occurs in 20 of them. Well, perhaps not so forgotten, but maybe such an obvious part of today’s supply chains that it is not looked at specifically, and just assumed to be part of the wider picture. Considering Norway’s maritime and seafaring tradition, it is not surprising to see Norwegian researchers taking up this particular question. One of the authors, Asbjørnslett, is part of the Marine System Design research group at the Department of Marine Technology at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway, where he among other topics is involved in research related to risk taxonomies in maritime transport systems, risk assessment in fleet scheduling, and studies of vessel accident data for improved maritime risk assessment.
The invisble risk?
It is interesting to see what starting point the authors use in their introduction, namely the 2008 Global Risk Report by the World Economic Forum. In my post on Supply Chain Vulnerability – the invisible global risk I highlighted that report, which listed the hyper-optimization of supply chains as one of four emerging threats at that time, and as the authors put it:
[…] risks in long and complex supply chains are obscured by the sheer degree of coupling and interaction between sources, stakeholders and processes within and outside of the system; disruptions are inevitable, management and preparation are therefore difficult […]
Akin to the infamous “Butterfly effect”, even a minor local disruption in my supply chain could have major and global implications not just on the company directly linked to the supply chain, i.e. me, but also on other businesses. Or conversely, some other company’s disruption may affect me severely, even though I in no (business) way am connected to said company.
Issues and questions
With that in mind the authors set out to address these particular issues they found in their preliminary observations:
I1—respondents have an operational focus; in this, they spend their efforts on frequent minor disruptions rather than the larger accidental events.
I2—stakeholders do know that larger events do happen, and they know that these are very costly, yet they do not prepare systematically to restore the system.
I3—maritime transportation stakeholders find their systems unique. As a consequence, they consider that little may be learnt from benchmarking other maritime transportation system’s efforts in improving vulnerability reduction efforts.
I4—there seems to be little visibility throughout the maritime transportation system.
which led them to to propose these research questions:
RQ1—what would be a suitable framework for addressing maritime transportation system vulnerability to disruption risks?
RQ2—which tools and methods are needed for increasing the ability of operators and dependents of maritime transportation to understand disruption risks, to withstand such risk, and to prepare to restore the functionality of the transportation system after a disruption has occurred?
I like this introduction, clearly identifying a direction and purpose of the paper.
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Source: husdal
