Measuring Resilience in Freight Transport During Drought Disruption

Abstract

The Netherlands was faced with drought disruption within their Inland Waterways (IWT) in the past few years. The drought of 2018 was so severe that the disruption caused economic losses. As the topic of drought disruption is new, little strategies have been developed to reduce the economic loss due drought disruption. One concept has gained growing attention in the literature for potentially reduces such losses - namely, Synchromodal transport. Synchromodal transport - also called Synchromodality - consists of allowing freight forwards to select a transport modality until the last moment, instead of planning far before as is done now. In our paper we research to what extent Synchromodal transport can increase the resilience of the Dutch freight transport system during drought disruptions. Our rational for this research is the absence of insights for policy makers on how to reduce economic losses during drought disruption. Our research developed a Discrete Event Simulation to measure the performance of Road, Rail and IWT during droughts. We further developed a resilience Framework which identified five resilience metrics. We embedded the results of the simulation model within these metrics to evaluate the impact of Synchromodal transport for different penetration rates. Our results show that Synchromodal transport is able to avoid drought disruptions but only at penetration rates above 55\% - which is seen as high. However, even when disruptions were still present, synchromodal transport helped reduced the damages done by big margins during the disruptions - event at low penetration rates. This suggests that any effort to adopt synchromodality can be useful against drought disruptions.