PhD Defence Camill Harter
In his dissertation, 'Vulnerability Through Vertical Collaboration in Transportation: A Complex Networks Approach', ERIM’s Camill Harter showed that vulnerability in collaborative transport networks is strongly influenced by the market structure of carriers; systems with mainly similar-sized carriers are robust to targeted disruption, whereas the total magnitude of potential failure is very large; systems with a few dominating players have a lower magnitude of failure but are highly susceptible to targeted disruption; moreover, there is an optimal level of collaboration where the increasing risk of disruption cascades outweighs the decreasing marginal added benefits of additional collaboration.