Abstract
Ensuring robustness and resilience in intermodal transportation systems is essential for the continuity and reliability of global logistics. These systems are vulnerable to various disruptions, including natural disasters and technical failures. Despite significant research on freight transportation resilience, investigating the robustness of the system after targeted and climate-change-driven disruption remains a crucial challenge. Drawing on network science methodologies, this study models the interdependencies within the rail and water transport networks and simulates different disruption scenarios to evaluate system responses. We use the data from the U.S. Department of Energy Volpe Center for network topology and tonnage projections. The proposed framework quantifies deliberate, stochastic, and climate-driven infrastructure failure, using higher resolution downscaled multiple Earth System Models’ simulations from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase version 6. We show that the disruptions of a few nodes could have a larger impact on the total tonnage of freight transport than on network topology. For example, the removal of targeted 20 nodes can bring the total tonnage carrying capacity to 30% with about 75% of the rail freight network intact. This research advances the theoretical understanding of transportation resilience and provides practical applications for infrastructure managers and policymakers. By implementing these strategies, stakeholders and policymakers can better prepare for and respond to unexpected disruptions, ensuring sustained operational efficiency in transportation networks.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 906-920 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Transportation Research Record |
| Volume | 2679 |
| Issue number | 12 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 2025 |
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) under the project (#DE-AR0001780), titled “A Cognitive Freight Transportation Digital Twin for Resiliency and Emission Control Through Optimizing Intermodal Logistics” (RECOIL). This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The U.S. government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for U.S. government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan). The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) under the project (#DE-AR0001780), titled “A Cognitive Freight Transportation Digital Twin for Resiliency and Emission Control Through Optimizing Intermodal Logistics” (RECOIL).
Keywords
- climate change
- freight
- freight systems
- natural hazards and extreme weather events
- sustainability and resilience
- vulnerability and resilience assessment