The change of global container shipping network vulnerability under intentional attack

To explore the current trend of the global container shipping network vulnerability, the analytical approach and quantitative methods were put forward for researching the change rate of the network vulnerability. We chose the routes distribution data from the world's main container liner companies in 2004 and 2014 as the study foundation. Sorted by the node degrees, the ports were gradually removed at a proportion from 1% to 10%. The quantitative foundation was the change rates of the eigenvalues before and after node removal, including the eigenvalues of network average degree, network clustering coefficient, network isolatednode proportion, network average shortest- path length and network efficiency. With the proposed pressure test, we calculated the weights and the values that each network eigenvalue has influence on the network vulnerability. Then we obtained the values of the change on the container shipping network vulnerability within the range of setting attack strength. The result shows that the vulnerability of the global container shipping network has the trend of becoming weaker in recent 10 years under intentional attack. When the scale of attack is less than 10% of the whole network, the vulnerability of the container shipping network has weakened by about 6.1%. The research conclusion in this paper has an important significance for deepening the research of port geography, and the analytical approach and method also provide reference to network characteristics analysis in other fields. © 2016, Science Press. All right reserved.