Dynamic robustness analysis of container marine transportation network using improved ACO approach

The robustness of container marine transportation network (CMTN) has tremendous effects in functioning and security of international shipping and logistics. Therefore, this paper investigates the dynamic robustness of CMTN against random and intentional attacks. We first present a CMTN reconfiguration model for dynamic robustness analysis, which reconfigures a CMTN structure according to types of attacks while minimizing the total cost of CMTN. Secondly an improved Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is proposed by importing crossover operators into a coarse-grained parallel ACO algorithm to solve the model. Thirdly dynamic robustness of CMTN is defined on the basis of complex network theory. Finally, its application to practical regional CMTN is presented to identify the CMTN robustness using the proposed ACO. The results indicate that the proposed ACO is suitable for solving CMTN problem, and CMTN is a random network but with scale-free characteristics, and better robustness against random and intentional attacks.