School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)
A leading school for the sustainable built environment. Through world-class education, impactful research, and strong industry partnerships, we prepare future-ready engineers and maritime professionals to shape a more sustainable future.
Undergraduate Programmes
Shape cities, protect the environment, or power global maritime industries. Select a programme to find out more.
Graduate Programmes
News
New Leadership: Welcoming Professor Ioannis Brilakis as the Next Chair of CEE
CEE Alumnus Dr Yu Shengkai Receives President’s Technology Award 2026
Congratulations to Professor Grzegorz Lisak on His Promotion to Full Professor
Inside NTU’s Future MRT Project
From Runway to Reality: Navigating the Western Island Construction Blueprint
2026 NTU URECA Poster Competition Winners: Kezia Stevani and Yim Zheng Long
NTU-CEE Seminar Series: A/P XU Mengqiao
The global liner shipping network (GLSN) is a critical infrastructure system that underpins maritime
logistics and international trade. This talk presents a research agenda for understanding the GLSN from
both structural and dynamic perspectives.
Organized By
CEE Seminar Committee
Host By
Asst Professor YAN Ran
Topic
Understanding the Structure and Dynamics of the Global Liner Shipping Network
About the Seminar
The global liner shipping network (GLSN) is a critical infrastructure system that underpins maritime logistics and international trade. This talk presents a research agenda for understanding the GLSN from both structural and dynamic perspectives. The first part focuses on structural analysis, addressing how the GLSN is self-organized, what structural principles shape its modular architecture, and which ports are critical to maintaining the network’s structural robustness.
The second part turns to dynamical processes in the GLSN, examining how disruptions propagate as cascading port congestion, how resilient the transportation performance of this network is to tropical cyclone disruptions, and how to predict the disappearance of inter-port shipping links in the yearly evolving network. Across these topics, the studies integrate methods from complex network analysis, cascading failure modeling, Monte Carlo simulation, combinatorial optimization, machine learning, deep learning, etc. Finally, the talk outlines a future direction on characterizing fine-grained temporal dynamics of the GLSN, which lays the foundation for addressing important resilience-oriented questions. One example, as I will discuss in the talk, is how to proactively and accurately assess the importance of each port on different dates for maintaining the transportation performance of the temporal GLSN.
About the Speaker
Dr. Mengqiao Xu is a tenured Associate Professor at the School of Economics and Management, Dalian University of Technology, and a recipient of Dalian City’s High-Level Young Talents award. Her research focuses on global maritime shipping networks and multimodal transportation networks, combining network science and data-driven modeling. She has published more than 30 papers as first author or sole corresponding author in journals such as Nature Communications, Reliability Engineering & System Safety, Transportation Research Part E and Part D, IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, and Global Networks. She has also led several nationally funded research projects, including projects supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Dr. Xu is committed to bridging academic research with digitalization in the port and shipping industry. She currently serves as Director of the Smart Logistics Joint Research Center, jointly established by Dalian University of Technology and Zhejiang Four-Port Linkage Development Co., Ltd. (a leading state-owned smart logistics platform company in China). She has led several industry-commissioned key technology R&D projects, with research outcomes implemented at Ningbo Zhoushan Port and reported by major national media outlets in China.