Applications of systems thinking for resilience study in Maritime Transportation System of Systems

Abstract

Maritime Transportation System (MTS) is a critical infrastructure system that enables economic activity through transferring goods between national and international destinations. This research is an effort to define and view MTS as a System of Systems (SoS) and apply Systems Thinking to understand, engineer, analyze, and govern it in a more effective and efficient way. We define Maritime Transportation System of Systems (MTSoS) as an integration of interdependent constituent systems and apply systemic tools such as Systemigrams to study critical properties of the system such as resilience and security through understanding its systemic interrelationships more effectively. A variety of systems engineering models have been applied to MTS. However, it is necessary to form a structured approach and develop new systemic toolsets that enables the stakeholders to view interdependencies and interconnections among the constituent systems of MTSoS.