Identifying container shipping network bottlenecks along China’s Maritime Silk Road based on a spectral analysis

ABSTRACT

The 21st Century Maritime Silk Road (MSR) initiated by China involves the construction of a new form of regional economic cooperation between China and the associated countries. Priority is given to eliminating maritime bottlenecks and improving maritime connectivity in the shipping network along the MSR. However, such potential bottlenecks have rarely been quantitatively identified. In this paper, we present a recursive spectral bi-partitioning method to detect the bottlenecks in the container shipping network along the MSR. This method identifies the bottlenecks by locating the cuts with the least total link frequency, normalised by the size of the port communities on either side of the cut. The results of the case study show that the proposed method performs well. Four bottlenecks with strategic geographical positions along the key trade lanes are found, namely: Suez Canal, Cape of Good Hope, northern Oceania, and the South China Sea, indicating locations in need of connectivity improvement.

KEYWORDS:

• Bottleneck identification
• 21st Century Maritime Silk Road
• spectral analysis
• connectivity
• container shipping network

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments as well as to the journal editors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Definition 1 of bottleneck from the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/bottleneck [accessed 20 August 2020].

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fujian Social Science Foundation [FJ2018C023], the Fujian Education and Scientific Research Project [JT180154], and the University of Sydney Business School Research Scholarship [SC1993].