Simulation of Port Miami crane processing time of shipping containers and the effect of a cyber attack on a subset of the cranes
Seaports are critical nodes of commerce for goods coming into and leaving the United States. According to the American Association of Port Authorities, seaports contributed $5.4 trillion to the economy in 2018 and the importance is only growing. A key chokepoint in seaborne commerce is how quickly shipping containers can be unloaded from, and loaded on to, trans-oceanic ships using ship to shore (STS) cranes. The simulation, and resulting paper, examined a microcosm of STS crane operations using Port Miami as a case study. It demonstrates how a cyber attack, affecting even a subset of STS cranes, at the port could incur a cascading backlog paralyzing the ports ability to process container traffic when compared to normal operations.