I-Corps: Software Platform for the Assessment and Measurement of Port Disruptions

这个i-Corps项目的广泛影响/商业潜力可能使利益攸关方能够模拟跨组织、跨基础设施中断对多式联运供应链运动的功能和经济影响。该项目直接解决了对更具弹性的供应链的需求。为提高效率而设计的准时化供应链可能会造成高影响的中断，并促使利益攸关方通过对多式联运网络的二次运营影响来了解中断造成的经济损失。弹性供应链移动的规划工具应采用整体威胁模型，使利益攸关方能够考虑基础设施复杂性和运营效率之间的权衡。算法和设想的软件平台将帮助利益相关者将新出现的威胁应用到他们的基础设施中，量化潜在的影响，并进行战略性投资，以提高社区的弹性。这个i-Corps项目集成了离散事件模拟和网络流优化，以计算通过航运港口的最优、成本最低的车辆和商品流。该模拟还根据非线性成本和经济影响对货物进行重新布线。这种优化算法增强了捕获能力限制和对商品流动中断造成的延误进行建模的能力。车辆和商品的路径问题是一个不确定的多项式时间难度问题。现有的方法使用时间扩展的网络来模拟商品的移动，但它们会导致大型实际实例的可伸缩性问题。该优化器采用动态的方法对离散时间进行建模，并引入延迟节点和弧线来适应集装箱的移动。所提出的优化器还在连续时间框架内约束商品的单位时间流量(例如道路容量、起重机运行率)，从而显著增强可伸缩性。该工具既估计了中断造成的成本，又找到了有效恢复或减轻影响的最低成本的方法。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project may enable stakeholders to model the functional and economic impact of cross-organizational, inter-infrastructure disruptions to intermodal supply chain movements. The project directly addresses the need for more resilient supply chains. Just-in-time supply chains designed for efficiency can result in high-impact disruptions and motivate the need for stakeholders to understand economic losses on disruptions via secondary, operational effects on intermodal transportation networks. Planning tools for resilient supply chain movements should employ holistic threat models that enable stakeholders to consider tradeoffs between infrastructure complexity and operational efficiencies. The algorithms and envisioned software platform will help stakeholders to apply emerging threats to their infrastructure, quantify potential impacts, and strategically invest for increased community resilience.This I-Corps project integrates discrete-event simulation and network flow optimization to compute optimal, cost-minimizing vehicle and commodity flows through shipping ports. The simulation also reroutes goods based on non-linear costs and economic impacts. This optimization algorithm enhances the capabilities to capture capacity constraints and to model delays resulting from disrupted commodity movements. Routing vehicles and commodities is a non-deterministic polynomial-time hardness problem. Existing approaches use time-expanded networks to model commodity movements, but they result in scalability issues for large practical instances. The proposed optimizer adopts a dynamic approach to model discrete times and introduces delay nodes and arcs to accommodate container movements. The proposed optimizer also constrains per-unit-time flow rates of commodities (e.g. road capacity, crane rate) in a continuous-time framework, thus significantly enhancing scalability. The tool both estimates costs due to disruptions and finds least cost ways to effectively recover from or mitigate their impacts.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.