Enhancing the resilience of the global crude oil maritime transportation network: a multi-strategy perspective

The global crude oil maritime transportation network faces growing risks from shipping route blockages and disruptions at major exporting countries and ports. To address these vulnerabilities, this study constructs a global oil transport network using real-world automatic identification system data and simulates three typical disruption scenarios: chokepoint closures, exporter country shutdowns, and export port failures. Four strategies are proposed to enhance resilience: structural redundancy, node robustness enhancement, optimized recovery scheduling, and cross-modal substitution via pipeline transport. Simulation results show that disruption location notably impacts the resilience of the global crude oil maritime transportation network, with chokepoint failures causing the most severe network performance losses. Each strategy demonstrates scenario-specific strengths: node robustness and optimized recovery perform well under chokepoint and exporter disruptions, structural redundancy is more effective in port-level disruptions, while cross-modal substitution offers valuable flexibility when supply is limited. The integrated strategy consistently delivers the highest resilience improvements, with maximum gains reaching 27.8%. These findings highlight the importance of adopting targeted and adaptive strategies for resilience planning and offer practical implications for resilience enhancement on global maritime oil transport systems.