Impact of the Red Sea crisis on the resilience of the container shipping network

As global supply chain integration deepens,container shipping networks face significant risks of connectivity disruption and transport efficiency degradation when encountering geopolitical conflicts. The outbreak of the Red Sea crisis in 2023 severely disrupted normal traffic through the Suez Canal,forcing large-scale vessel diversions via the Cape of Good Hope. This has extended shipping times,increased transportation costs,and directly impacted shipping efficiency and supply chain stability. Existing research on maritime network resilience predominantly relies on static topological indicators,which fail to capture the cascading failure processes triggered by load redistribution following critical node failures,and exhibit notable deficiencies in mechanistically modeling the nonlinear impacts of sudden-onset events. To address these limitations,this paper constructs a container shipping network for Asia,Africa,and Europe based on complex network theory and cascading failure models to assess the impact of the Red Sea crisis on maritime network resilience. The study employs a load-capacity redistribution model to simulate cascading failures under different attack strategies and quantifies resilience metrics such as network efficiency and the size of the largest connected component. Simulations reveal that: 1)The Red Sea crisis weakens the connectivity of pivotal hub ports along the affected route while enhancing the transshipment capacity of Southeast Asian ports; route restructuring increases the network's average path length by 19. 7% and reduces its clustering coefficient by 13. 4%. 2) Cascading failure simulations demonstrate that targeted attacks are substantially more destructive than random attacks. Under a 5% attack ratio during the crisis,network efficiency drops to 30%,and the proportion of the largest connected component plummets to 3. 6%. 3) Parameter analysis of different node capacity levels indicates that moderate redundancy can balance connectivity and transport efficiency. This study elucidates the nonlinear impact mechanisms of geopolitical conflicts on shipping networks,providing empirical data and a theoretical reference for optimizing network resilience.