Smart Port and Shipping Optimization: Enhancing Resilience Amidst Geopolitical Volatility and Conflict

As the backbone of global trade and energy security, maritime transport and port infrastructure are critical to international economic stability. However, the global maritime landscape is increasingly characterized by geopolitical turbulence, ranging from regional armed conflicts and strategic strait blockades to trade sanctions and piracy. Unlike traditional market-driven fluctuations or natural disasters, these man-made shocks are often abrupt, adversarial, and carry cascading risks that fragment shipping routes and trigger extreme volatility in freight rates. Conventional scheduling and logistics optimization models, which often assume a stable operational environment, are increasingly inadequate in the face of such non-linear disruptions. Concurrently, the rapid evolution of intelligent technologies—including Large Language Models (LLMs), Digital Twins, and the Internet of Things (IoT)—offers a transformative toolkit. These advancements provide the necessary capabilities for real-time situational awareness and adaptive decision-making, which are essential for bolstering the resilience and risk tolerance of modern port and shipping systems.The primary objective of this Research Topic is to bridge the gap between geopolitical risk modeling and maritime operational optimization. We aim to address the fundamental challenge of maintaining service continuity when maritime nodes and links are compromised by political or security-related crises. This collection seeks to showcase how learning-augmented optimization, data-driven simulations, and AI-enabled frameworks can transform reactive crisis management into proactive resilience. By integrating multidisciplinary perspectives—ranging from operations research to political science—this topic will explore innovative strategies for dynamic reconfiguration and resilient maritime governance, ensuring that global supply chains remain robust under conditions of extreme uncertainty.We invite original research articles, comprehensive reviews, and case studies that employ innovative methodologies to explore smart port and shipping optimization under geopolitical pressure. We particularly encourage submissions that utilize operations research, game theory, big data analytics, and AI-driven modeling to solve complex maritime disruptions.Specific themes of interest include, but are not limited to:• Resilient Network Design: Conflict-aware maritime routing and network reconfiguration strategies.• Adaptive Scheduling: Real-time vessel schedule recovery and port congestion management during crises.• Risk Modeling: Quantitative methods for assessing the cascading effects of sanctions and blockades.• Game Theory & Policy: Maritime collaborative governance and mechanism design in multi-actor adversarial settings.• Smartization & Digital Twins: The role of AI and Digital Twins in enhancing situational awareness and security.• Economic Impact: Revenue management and risk hedging amid freight rate volatility caused by geopolitical shifts.• Empirical Studies: In-depth analysis of representative disruption scenarios (e.g., Red Sea crisis, Arctic route developments). Topic editors: Shaorui Zhou, Feng Zhu, Wei Huang, Lang Xu Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/77704/smart-port-and-shipping-optimization-enhancing-resilience-amidst-geopolitical-volatility-and-conflict