Blog Archives

Transport infrastructure resilience

Is it possible to devise a simple framework for assessing the resilience of the transport infrastructure? The answer is Yes, and the New Zealand Transport Agency has done so.

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Transport Network Disruption

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the scholarly literature related to the field of network-disruption analysis. A number of methods have attempted to deal with the problem of isolating links in different ways, but none has been ubiquitously successful. Why is that so?

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INSTR 2012 – Call for papers

The INSTR series is the premier gathering for the world’s leading researchers and professionals interested in transportation network reliability, to discuss both recent research and future research directions. The deadline for submitting abstracts is 30 January 2012.

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The UK Transport Network Resilience…and I

The report, written by the Hyder Consulting Group, dated 2010 and titled Network Resilience and Adaptation, assesses and details in great depth the vulnerability and resilience of the transport infrastructure in the East of England. And it uses me as a reference.

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Extreme Weather Hazards and Transportation Vulnerability

Weather Extremes: Assessment of Impacts on Transport Systems and Hazards for European Regions is an EU project that aims at analysing the economic costs of more frequent and more extreme weather events on transport and on the wider economy and explores adaptation strategies in the context of sustainable policy design.

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Transportation Resilience

Resilience is related to three overarching concepts: 1) the vulnerability to unpredictable shocks, 2) the resources or wealth available to a system to help it change, and 3) the internal controllability of relationships in a system, i.e. its rigidity or flexibility.

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Importance and Exposure – Measures of Vulnerability?

The paper calculates several indices for link importance and site exposure for the Swedish road network, based on the increase in generalized travel cost when links are closed.

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Today’s transport disruption: volcanoes

Now Norway and much of Northern Europe are facing a major supply chain disruption: The shutdown of all air traffic because of a volcano eruption on Iceland. What will happen next?

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Transportation – the forgotten staple

Transportation is a staple ingredient in supply chains and uncertainty is a staple ingredient in risk assessments, and consequently, transportation uncertainty is a staple ingredient in supply chain risks.

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No grit No roads No show?

No grit means no cleared roads means no one able to get anywhere and a no-show of people everywhere. Employees not coming to work because of extreme weather will cost the UK £12,000,000,000,000.

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Road Vulnerability

Today we are going back in time, to one of the seminal articles in road vulnerability. It is a conceptual paper that provides the basis for why road vulnerability needs to be a more important issue .

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Critical: Beer Distribution

Beer distribution is a sector that will be highly affected by a supply chain disruption…in the UK. You could even say that beer distribution is part of the UK critical infrastructure.

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Transportation Lifelines and Critical Infrastructure

This is the first paper that sparked my research interest in transportation vulnerability, and what would later become the focus area of my research: the cost of transportation vulnerability and the benefit of transportation reliability.

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Transportation Hazards

The chapter on transportation hazards in the Handbook of Transportation Engineering uses the risk definition by Kaplan and Garrick. It is is concise and to the point and boosts an impressive reference list for further in-depth study.

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Bad locations = bad logistics?

How are companies located in sparse transport networks affected by supply chain disruptions? This article develops a new framework for the categorization of supply chains, and introduces the notion of the constrained supply chain.

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Highway Vulnerability and Criticality Assessment

It is important to distinguish to between criticality and vulnerability when assessing the importance of the road and highway network. Collectively, these factors are an indication of the conditions, concerns, consequences, and capabilities that might cause an operating agency to label an asset “critical.”

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Are roads more important than computers?

The objective of the first project ‘Protection of Society’ (POS) or ‘Beskyttelse av Samfunnet’ (BAS, in Norwegian) was to describe how modern society will react to and can protect itself when facing modern warfare. In doing so, the report identified key components and functions that are essential to a modern society, and interdependencies between them.

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Engineering transportation lifelines

New Zealand is probably not the fist country that comes to mind when thinking of state-of-the-art transportation lifeline engineering. Nonetheless, I think it is time to consider New Zealand as being one of the countries at the very forefront.

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Book Review: Transportation Security

This is an excellent book. Despite being compiled from different contributions, the overall style is clear and concise, with objectives stated at the beginning of each chapter. Although at times heavily US and homeland security oriented, this book still manages to capture me, the international audience, to the full.

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Book Review: Transportation Systems Security

This book, Transportation Systems Security by by Allan McDougall and Robert Radvanovsky is not what I thought it would be, but it’s not the books fault, I have to admit that much. It’s the classic misunderstanding of the difference of the terms “safety” and “security”.

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ARTICLES and PAPERS
Certain death: Not risky. Uncertain death: risky.
If you know for sure that things will go wrong, there really is no risk. If you don't know for sure [...]
A new and better way of classifying and managing risks?
Risk. The probability of an event occurring and the consequences of the event occurring. That is how[...]
BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
ISCRiM 2010 Proceedings
Two weeks ago I attended the ISCRiM 2010 seminar at Loughborough University, a gathering of some of [...]
Book Review: Virtual Teams
This is another post resulting from my literature review when researching background material for my[...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
Vulnerable or valuable supply chain?
More than a year old now, but still holding not so few words of wisdom is the Pricewaterhouse Cooper[...]
Global Risks 2012
Are economic imbalances and social inequality risk reversing the gains of globalization? Should we s[...]
from HERE and THERE
Supply chains compete, not companies
"Supply chains compete, not companies" is the motto on Martin Christopher's web site, www.martin-chr[...]
Remote Logistics
Yesterday I was talking about emergency logistics, today it is remote logistics. The other day I ca[...]