Resilience Assessment of Cascading Failures in Dual-Layer International Railway Freight Networks Based on Coupled Map Lattice

The China Railway Express (China-Europe container railway freight transport) is pivotal to Eurasian freight, yet its transcontinental railway faces escalating cascading risks. We develop a coupled map lattice (CML) model representing the physical infrastructure layer and the operational traffic layer concurrently to quantify and mitigate cascading failures. Twenty critical stations are identified by integrating TOPSIS entropy weighting with grey relational analysis in dual-layer networks. The enhanced CML embeds node-degree, edge-betweenness, and freight-flow coupling coefficients, and introduces two adaptive cargo-redistribution rules—distance-based and load-based for real-time rerouting. Extensive simulations reveal that network resilience peaks when the coupling coefficient equals 0.4. Under targeted attacks, cascading failures propagate within three to four iterations and reduce network efficiency by more than 50%, indicating the vital function of higher importance nodes. Distance-based redistribution outperforms load-based redistribution after node failures, whereas the opposite occurs after edge failures. These findings attract our attention that redundant border corridors and intelligent monitoring should be deployed, while redistribution rules and multi-tier emergency response systems should be employed according to different scenarios. The proposed methodology provides a dual-layer analytical framework for addressing cascading risks of transcontinental networks, offering actionable guidance for intelligent transportation management of international intermodal freight networks.