Resilience-oriented recovery strategies for crude oil maritime transportation networks of importing countries using mass tanker trajectory data

Maritime crude oil transportation network (COMTN) underpins energy security for importing countries, yet the post-disruption recovery phase of the network remains underexplored. The COMTN exhibits pronounced asymmetric flow dynamics and depends on coordinated actions by multiple stakeholders. To address this gap, we propose a novel resilience optimization model that integrates four stakeholder-oriented response strategies led by nation's decision. We construct a high-fidelity real-world COMTN model from crude oil tanker AIS data, explicitly representing both laden and ballast voyages, distinguishing direct return voyages (DRVs) from indirect return voyages (IRVs), and estimating the time cost of IRVs using a semi-Markov chain. Using China as a representative importing country and processing tanker trajectories for 2023, we apply the model to evaluate recovery performance under alternative disruption scenarios, uncovering distinct recovery priorities and strategy-dependent resilience characteristics of China's COMTN. The result shows that, for China's COMTN, the generalized cost based (GC-based) response strategy delivers the highest resilience across disruption scenarios. The ports and transport links in Northeast Asia, as well as the routes crossing the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Malacca and the Taiwan Strait, are consistently assigned high recovery priority. The proposed framework and findings provide practical guidance for importing countries to design more effective COMTN recovery plans and to enhance network resilience.