Vulnerability and resilience of ports and maritime networks to cascading failures and targeted attacks

A key question in the context of large-scale technological and infrastructural networks concerns their response to local failure and resilience to partial accidental breakdown or anticipated attacks (Woolley-Meza et al., 2011). Moreover ports and maritime networks are subject to unpredictable, recurrent and extreme weather conditions that lead to repetitive and regionally-localized failure that must be compensated for by re-routing traffic or re-planning schedules (Woolley-Meza et al., 2011). That is why it seems relevant to study vulnerability and resilience of ports and maritime networks.