Assessing the System Resilience Trade-Off Space: Empirical Model of the Port of Houston Waterway Recovery Process

Abstract

When they are disrupted, complex, technical-social systems, such as maritime ports, require operators to negotiate a resilient solution that satisfies a broad range of individual business and societal needs without compromising the long-term integrity of the system. In order to achieve this, port operators must make complex tradeoffs among various objectives. For example, during operational disruptions, port operators in some systems may create formal and informal procedures (i.e., protocols) to shift from decentralized to centralized decision-making temporarily. In this context, the term port operator refers to any entity private or public operating within the port. Within this shift from decentralized to centralized decision-making, we found two high-level heuristics, which can be categorized as feasibility and prioritization. Feasibility assessments are generally safety-based and tend to be very risk-averse, whereas prioritization rules allow more flexibility. This paper explores—within an empirical context—how varying these prioritization rules define the trade-off space for vessel-move sequencing decisions. This trade-off space describes the qualitative impact of the heuristic across different industry segments. This article demonstrates that prioritization rules can alter the recovery dynamic without compromising existing safety protocols.