Objectives As a critical mode of transportation for global trade, the security of maritime shipping is essential to international commerce. Recent armed conflicts in the Red Sea region have significantly endangered safe passage through this vital shipping lane and have had profound effects on the global supply chain of strategic commodities. Given the Red Sea's strategic position linking Asia, Europe, and Africa, disruptions in this region could rapidly propagate across interconnected maritime networks, triggering cascading effects on global logistics systems and increasing systemic risks in international trade. Moreover, such disruptions could lead to route detours, increased transportation costs, and delays, thereby further exacerbating supply chain instability. Although an increasing volume of research has focused on tracking and analyzing the long-term impacts of the shipping system following major events, there remained an urgent need to capture and analyze real-time conflicts. Such research was critical for enabling timely responses to the challenges confronting the maritime system, thus helping to mitigate negative impacts. In particular, the ability to conduct near-real-time monitoring and short-term impact assessment was essential for identifying early-stage disruptions and supporting rapid operational and policy responses. This shift from ex-post analysis to near-real-time evaluation represented an important advancement in maritime risk analysis.

Methods First, changes in the number of shipping routes were analyzed to evaluate the impact on countries across different geographic regions and geopolitical contexts, providing a macroscopic perspective on the redistribution of maritime flows. Second, shifts in the transport volume of five strategic materials were assessed by incorporating material-specific weights, enabling the evaluation of both quantity changes and their relative importance in global trade. Furthermore, changes in the maritime network of strategic materials were examined to identify affected nodes and edges. Network evolution patterns were then analyzed using key indicators, including network connectivity, path efficiency, and node centrality, to evaluate structural robustness and functional performance under external shocks.

Results The results showed that, in terms of affected maritime routes, there was no decline in the average daily number of voyages for countries in Asia and Africa, while all other continents experienced a decreasing trend. The rate of decline among affected countries was notably more significant than that among unaffected ones. This suggested that geographic proximity, trade intensity, and reliance on the Red Sea corridor played critical roles in determining the extent of disruption experienced by different regions. From the perspective of strategic materials, iron, crude oil, and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) shipments dominated the traffic. Except for liquefied natural gas (LNG), which exhibited an increase in average daily traffic, other strategic materials displayed a similar downward trend by the end of the study period. The contrasting trend observed for LNG might have reflected adaptive rerouting strategies, shifts in energy demand structures, or substitution effects within global energy supply chains. At the network evolution level, the core nodes of the maritime network remained stable in the face of shocks. This stability indicated the resilience of major hub ports and their continued central role in sustaining global connectivity despite regional disruptions. Different strategic material networks demonstrated distinct adaptation patterns, with grain and LPG networks showing an increase in the average shortest path length compared to the pre-shock period, while crude oil, LPG, and iron ore networks exhibited a more aggregated and short-distance adaptation pattern. The increase in path length suggested reduced transport efficiency and potential detours, whereas aggregation indicated a tendency toward regionalization under constraints. Iron ore demonstrated high stability, energy materials (LNG, LPG, and crude oil) exhibited moderate stability, and the food maritime network was the most volatile. These differences highlighted the heterogeneous resilience of commodity-specific transport networks and reflected variations in supply chain flexibility and substitution capacity. In summary, we captured and analyzed the impacts of unforeseen events on the maritime transport network in a timely manner by integrating data from multiple sources and employing a limited time window and geographic scope.

Conclusions Compared with conventional post-event studies, this approach enabled faster detection of disruptions, improved the responsiveness of analytical frameworks, and provided more actionable insights for policymakers and industry stakeholders. Furthermore, it offered a scalable methodology for assessing similar geopolitical shocks in other critical transport corridors. The assessment revealed significant disruptions in global transport patterns in the Red Sea region, highlighting the importance of maintaining global trade flows and supply chain stability in the context of globalization. Overall, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of maritime network resilience and provides empirical support for enhancing risk management strategies in global shipping systems.