Abstract
Seaports are critical nodes in regional transportation networks and can have important impact to the local economy. During recent earthquakes, seaports have demonstrated that they can be highly vulnerable to seismic motion and associated ground failures, and their poor seismic performance has resulted in billions of dollars of losses. In order to make informed decisions concerning the design, expansion, and retrofit of port facilities, it is important to forecast the economic and operational outcome after such events. In this paper, the authors present a methodology to assess probabilistically the operational losses in multiterminal container ports after scenario earthquakes via simulation. For this purpose, a port operations simulation model is developed and is applied to various single and multiterminal examples. It is shown that parameters like the total downtime and the correlation between the damage states in different structures can significantly affect the losses. It is also shown that proper post-earthquake operation strategies can minimize the total operational loss.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.