Resilience in transportation systems: a systematic review and future directions

ABSTRACT

The Belt and Road (B&R) initiative was introduced by the Chinese government to promote the worldwide economic development and multilateral cooperation between China and the associated countries. As a crucial part of global supply chains, transportation plays a key role to ensure the implementation of the B&R. Safety is one of the issues with great importance in transportation research. However, its foci have been expanded from traditional risk through security to resilience and sustainability. Resilience has attracted considerable interests from both researchers and practitioners across different research domains in recent years. Various studies have been conducted on transportation resilience from different perspectives. Consequently, different definitions have been developed to define and describe resilience. This paper presents a systematic review on transportation resilience with emphasis on its definitions, characteristics, and research methods applied in different transportation systems/contexts. It aims to figure out what transportation resilience is and what kind of essential characters it usually has. More importantly, research challenges are analysed and a future research agenda on the resilience of transportation systems is proposed. This paper will provide comprehensive insights into understanding the transportation resilience, as well as establish new horizons for relevant research topics within the context of the B&R.

KEYWORDS:

• The Belt and Road (B&R)
• resilience
• transportation systems
• literature review
• the Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road

Acknowledgements

The authors would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The main aim of this study is to investigate the definitions, features, and characteristics of transportation resilience. Pure mathematical analyses on resilience with little relevant information are therefore excluded.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by China Scholarship Council: [Grant Number 201506950023]; EU FP7 Marie Curie IRSES: [Grant Number PIRSES-GA-2013-612546].