Providing Port Resiliency through Technology

Abstract

With the virtual removal of country borders and changing modes of production, maritime ports have emerged as vital components of the global supply chains. Significant potential repercussions of long term disruptions to the global supply chain operations have rendered the maritime ports an attractive terrorist target and important asset during natural disasters. Referring to the quick recovery ability of ports from natural and terrorist threats, authorities have coined the term resiliency and devised strategies and frameworks for providing increased resiliency. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of the new millennium targeting maritime assets, the IMO has introduced the ISPS Code as an appendix to the SOLAS. The ISPS Code introduces new mandatory security and risk assessment procedures to improve the security of the ports. However, this code does not include any guidelines for the implementation and assessment of its requirements leaving the stakeholders in the dark. The purpose of this thesis is the identification of emerging technologies that can help in implementing policies aimed at increasing the port resiliency against terrorist and natural threats. Additionally, guidelines regarding the incorporation of these technologies into the implementation process of the ISPS Code as well as how much the ISPS Code is pertinent to the resiliency planning process is also discussed. In the beginning, resiliency is defined as a measure of robustness. In the theoretical part, the major elements of resiliency planning work, namely the threats to resiliency, how to assess the risks of these threats in the port operation, and how to mitigate these threats and risks to provide increased resiliency are described and discussed in detail. The problems of risk assessment against terrorist threats due to the involved human factors are included and its deviation from traditional risk assessment procedures is discussed. To relate the resiliency planning process to the tasks of the ISPS Code implementation, the ISPS Code is discussed in detail. Following these summary sections, a literature review of emerging technologies pertaining to the maritime domain is included and a discussion as to how these technologies can be adopted for providing increased resiliency. In conclusion, emerging technologies such as radars, sonars and imaging technologies are very useful in providing awareness in the port environment and can provide knowledge aids in the aftermath or during the terrorist or natural events and result in increased resiliency. The key element in providing these aids is the use of emerging information technologies to condense the huge amount of information incoming from various sensors into usable and easily sharable information aids, this is the main idea behind the cognitive ports which also involve automated decision making rules. However, this vision is only realizable given the information sharing incentives and framework are available among various stakeholders, the ISPS Code partly achieves this goal.