Resilience Assessment for the Northern Sea Route Based on a Fuzzy Bayesian Network

Abstract

The safety level of the northern sea route (NSR) is a common concern for the related stakeholders. To address the risks triggered by disruptions initiating from the harsh environment and human factors, a comprehensive framework is proposed based on the perspective of resilience. Notably, the resilience of NSR is decomposed into three capacities, namely, the absorptive capacity, adaptive capacity, and restorative capacity. Moreover, the disruptions to the resilience are identified. Then, a Bayesian network (BN) model is established to quantify resilience, and the prior probabilities of parent nodes and conditional probability table for the network are obtained by fuzzy theory and expert elicitation. Finally, the developed Bayesian networkBN model is simulated to analyze the resilience level of the NSR by back propagation, sensitivity analysis, and information entropy analysis. The general interpretation of these analyses indicates that the emergency response, ice-breaking capacity, and rescue and anti-pollution facilities are the critical factors that contribute to the resilience of the NSR. Good knowledge of the absorptive capacity is the most effective way to reduce the uncertainty of NSR resilience. The present study provides a resilience perspective to understand the safety issues associated with the NSR, which can be seen as the main innovation of this work.