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

这个I-Corps项目的更广泛的影响/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流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及时供应链可能会造成影响严重的中断，并促使利益攸关方了解中断对多式联运网络的二次运营影响所造成的经济损失。弹性供应链移动的规划工具应采用整体威胁模型，使利益相关者能够考虑基础设施复杂性和运营效率之间的权衡。 该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于其基础设施，量化潜在影响，并战略性地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佳、成本最小化的车辆和商品流。 模拟还根据非线性成本和经济影响重新安排货物的路线。 这种优化算法增强了捕获能力限制和模拟商品流动中断造成的延迟的能力。 车辆和货物的路径问题是一个非确定性的多项式时间困难问题。 现有的方法使用时间扩展的网络来模拟商品流动，但它们会导致大的实际情况下的可扩展性问题。 该优化器采用动态的方法来模拟离散时间，并引入延迟节点和弧来适应集装箱的运动。 建议的优化器还约束单位时间的商品流量（如道路通行能力，起重机率）在一个连续的时间框架，从而显着提高可扩展性。 该工具既可以估算中断造成的成本，又可以找到成本最低的方法来有效地从中断中恢复或减轻其影响。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.