Identifier

etd-06022016-163746

Degree

Master of Science in Civil Engineering (MSCE)

Department

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

The United States Marine Transportation System (MTS) makes large contributions to the nation’s economy, security, safety, and quality of life. Strategic investment, planning, administrative and operational decisions by government at all levels are necessary to maintain the marine transportation system performance at all times, which in turn requires a technical approach and professional leadership based on research. This study describes the approach and results of an ongoing research effort to assess the resiliency of port operations following major disasters and other disruptive events. The work presented in this research uses a set of archival data from the United States Coast Guard’s Nationwide Automatic Identification System (NAIS) to quantify the state of resiliency by investigating the operation of coastal navigation systems before, during and after disruptive events. To illustrate the ability of proposed methodology to assess the resiliency of a marine transportation system, two case studies representing two different types of infrastructure disruption are presented. The first case study involves the disruption that resulted from a collision in March 2014 in Texas in the Houston Ship Channel as a no-notice event. The second was a disruption caused by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 on the greater Port of New York/New Jersey as a pre-notice event. The results of this study revealed the importance of AIS data as a source of quantitative data when seeking post-disaster measures of resiliency. From an application viewpoint, the methods and results presented herein can be adapted and implemented to quantitatively evaluate the amount of port specific service loss and the levels of port activity following disruptive events.

Date

2016

Document Availability at the Time of Submission

Student has submitted appropriate documentation to restrict access to LSU for 365 days after which the document will be released for worldwide access.

Committee Chair

Woshon, Brian

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_theses.1193

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