Active stabilisation of seaports co-evolution system for port throughput with time delay

This paper aims to investigate co-evolution dynamics with decision-making policy for seaport throughput subjected to the time-delayed interactions. To explore interaction relationships among seaports, dynamical behaviours of co-evolution system are demonstrated using Lotka-Volterra model. Due to the time delay of interactions, the co-evolution dynamics exhibits strong fluctuations and undesirable behaviours leading to system instabilities. Adaptive fractional order sliding mode control is implemented to achieve robust stabilisation of the nonlinear co-evolution system with time delay under disturbances. The numerical simulations are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm. This study systematically explains how time delays in the supply chains affect seaport co-evolution behaviours for cargo throughput and how they can be actively managed by decision-making strategy. The results reveal that the proposed methodology can provide a resilience strategy under market uncertainty. Finally, conclusions are made regarding the manageable side of the time-delay problems.