Decision Support for Port Visits

Ports have an important role for global trade. They serve as locations for transhipments to be made and as intermodal connection points between sea-based and land-based transportation. Some ports also offer additional services of refinement of goods that pass through them. For the port, there exist great challenges to balance between a large degree of flexibility on one hand and having a solid structure of plans for forthcoming visits by ships and different types of hinterland carriers. Consequently, the well-coordinated port needs to be well-informed about when ships and hinterland carriers, as episodic Tightly Coupled actors, will use the port and consequently be able to make sound decisions about reserving appropriate resources and infrastructure to serve them. It needs a good understanding of the status of goods and passenger flows and to be able to track carriers’ movements so as to predict and coordinate the different types of events in the port. The Port Collaborative Decision Making (PortCDM) concept, the sharing of time stamps (A digital message with details of a planned or actual event.) for an emerging common situational awareness among involved participants, has been designed specifically to enable this. In this chapter we elaborate on how data from systems of production channelise data to systems of record to serve the distributed coordination of port call operations pursued among engaged actors. Such systems of record form the foundation for an elastic approach to time slot allocation enabling the reservation of capacity among engaged co-producing port actors and the timely interaction of episodic Tightly Coupled actors.