Resilient Strategy

1. Reserved capacity (proactive strategy)

To cope with disruptions, several research directions have emerged and robustness is one of them. Researches related to the robustness in the transportation domain are mostly

concerned with allocating buffers times or additional resources to absorb disturbances.

Through the expert interviews, we also know that international express carrier usually

prepares surplus mode capacities to cope with the emergency, but the reserved capacity might not be the main researched part in our studies. The reason is that company is impossible to reserve too much space for the unexpected severe disruption practically. It costs much.

However, the adequate buffers still can help company slightly reduced the queuing pressure during the disruption. Thus, we apply the sensitivity analysis in the chapter 4 to know how much impact the reserved capacity parameter has on the model.

2. Alternative route (reactive strategy)

Alternative route is the more common and appropriate strategy to respond severe disruption in contrast to the small disruption, like truck and flight delay problem. The severe disruptions usually cause the transportation system coming to a standstill, for example the regional roads network inaccessible and entire airport closure. The intuitional method to respond the disruption is changing the original route to another available route.

3. Multi-carrier transportation (reactive strategy)

The international express companies usually rent the air containers from other airlines if inland transport delays happen or their aircraft needs to repair. The same situation also happens on the trucks company. If carriers can’t transport freights by themselves, they may rent the trucks from other carriers.

The capacity which is rent from other carriers’ is another kind of available resources during the disruption, but they are difficult to be acquired and very expansive. Thus, we are going to discuss two kinds of rent types which are the non-contractual partner and contractual partner. What are their strengths and shortages?

(1) Renting the modes from non-contractual partners

Renting from non-contractual partners, for example, China airline and Transasia Airways, is less expensive but the flights often can’t meet the schedule precisely. When the disruption occurs, the resource from this kind of partner may be rare, because there are many companies who also need to transport their cargos.

(2) Renting the modes from contractual partners

Logistics service providers are going to forge the strategic alliance because they want to reach that economies of scale and gain the utilization of unfilled space

nowadays. Oum et al. (2000) described a strategic alliance as a medium- to long-term partnership formed by two or more firms with a common goal of improving

competitiveness. Except for the above intentions, forging strategic alliance conduces to respond the emergent events or severe disruption event. Aligned partners can give the support of mode capacities to each other. For example, DHL and Polar Air Cargo Worldwide have contractual service agreements. The partnership transaction includes a commercial arrangement that gives DHL Express guaranteed access to Polar Air Cargo's aircraft capacity in key global markets over a period of 20 years. The long term access will significantly improve service to DHL Express' customers who ship goods between Asia Pacific and the US. The transit times are reduced and the reliability of delivery is increased on the trans-Pacific air routes. These kinds of partners can provide more

time-accurate flights to partners and fill the requirement to transportation task in the emergent situation but the cost is higher than the non-contractual partners.

4. Multi-modal transportation (reactive strategy)

It’s worth to note that from the literature the common recovery manner in the transportation field is using different modes, but it is not adopted for the express industry nowadays. Express company cares for timely transportation. According to its transportation process, the trucks for the inland transport need to meet time deadlines of flight at the airport, otherwise, it will delay the freights which are transported by the next flight. Even if the road system is blocked or broken partially due to disaster, the express company won’t choose the rail transport. If the travel time in rail transport including transportation time and

transshipment time is longer than in the truck transport when there is no disruption, can we expect more on the rail transport to catch flights in an emergency? The answer is negative.

That’s why the rail transport is not to be adopted in the express industry. The maritime transport to the air transport is the same.

Although the express industry doesn’t regard multi-modal transportation as one of recovery strategies in practice, we still think it is an possible manner to recover the transportation activities. In our model, we consider the mode choice as one of resilient strategies.

Although we review the proactive and reactive resilient strategies in the chapter two and explore the resilient strategies which are appropriate for the international express company in the chapter three, the model that we propose below is focusing on modeling the reactive strategies. The proactive resilient strategies which involve the planning decision before the disruption are not in our research scope.