Resilience analysis of the integrated China-Europe freight transportation network under heterogeneous demands

In recent years, there have been recurrent disruptions in global freight transportation shipping, prompting a focus on the need for increased resilience in the freight transportation network. Against this backdrop, the China-Europe Railway Express, an emerging alternative to shipping, has gained improvement. In light of these developments, an assessment of the resilience of the integrated China-Europe Freight Transportation Network (CEFTN) under disruptive influences has become crucial. In response to this necessity, this paper puts forward a generalized cost-based assessment system considering heterogeneous freight demands for evaluating the resilience of the CEFTN. In the case study, we not only conduct a series of sensitivity analyses to discover the impact of proportion of heterogeneous demands, freight charges, and duration time of disruptions on the system resilience, but also give a variety of detailed resilience analyses under different disrupted scenarios including system failures, natural disasters, geopolitical impact, and deliberate attacks. Through our analysis, we find that an increase in freight charges during disruptions could potentially improve the CEFTN resilience due to the effect of high time-value freight demands replacing low time-value freight demands. Moreover, strategies such as adjusting the freight flow, safeguarding critical links, and implementing different measures in different nodes are identified as additional measures to improve the resilience of the CEFTN.