The role of dry port in hub-and-spoke network under Belt and Road Initiative

ABSTRACT

Dry port plays increasingly an important role in the integration of inland regions with seaports, and cross-border inland ports especially in the context of Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) originally proposed by China. This paper studies a logistics network connecting the inland regions by dry ports based on a two-stage logistical gravity model. First, a basic logistical gravity model is developed to analyze the radiated inland regions from dry ports, where the logistical quality of dry ports is calculated by principal component analysis. Second, considering mutual impacts among dry ports, seaports and cross-border inland ports, the influence of logistical gravity on the network is examined by using a coefficient based on the Ordered Weighted Averaging Operator in multi-attribute decision theory. An improved logistical gravity model is further developed to investigate the logistical connections among various ports (e.g. dry ports, seaports and cross-border inland ports; hub and feeder ports). Then, a hub-and-spoke network can be established. Dry ports are potential to connect to the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road. So a Chinese case is used to verify the proposed method. The strategies of embedding inland regions in the BRI are discussed based on the experimental studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Belt and Road Initiative
• the Silk Road Economic Belt
• the 21st-century Maritime Silk Road
• dry ports
• gravity model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant numbers 71390520 and 71471109], and the research project of Shanghai Science and Technology Committee [Grant number 17DZ2280200].