Identifying important ports in maritime container shipping networks along the Maritime Silk Road

Ports, as the main components of global maritime transportation, have attracted attention from both industry and academia in relation to their safety management. Identifying the important ports of a maritime shipping network is necessary and significant for the recovery of ports when encountering severe disasters, especially with limited emergency resources. This paper proposes a new method to evaluate the importance of ports by incorporating centrality measures of networks into the TOPSIS framework. Three types of centrality measures were used in an integrated manner to provide a more comprehensive evaluation of the port importance. Some economic factors such as the throughput of ports and GDP of the cities are also considered in combination with the entropy weight method to determine the weight of each criterion in the proposed model. Furthermore, a case study of the ports along the (MSR) shipping network is conducted to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method in identifying essential ports. [Display omitted] •This paper proposes a new method to evaluate the importance of ports by incorporating centrality measures and economic indicators (such as GDP and port throughput) into the TOPSIS framework.•This research provides a theoretical basis for identifying influential ports in complex maritime transportation networks.•The evaluation results revealed that among the top ten important ports of the MSR shipping network, six are from China. The top three most important ports are the Port of Singapore, Hong Kong and Shenzhen.