| | | Port Management | |
Large ports need to deal with a number of disparate activities: the movement of ships, containers and other cargo, the loading and unloading of ships and containers, customs activities. As well as human resources, anchorages, channels, lighters, tugs, berths, warehouse and other storage spaces have to be allocated and released. The efficient management of a port involves managing these activities and resources, managing the flows of money involved between the agents providing and using these resources, and providing management information. Many separate computer management and information systems will be involved. Integrated port management is concerned with integrating these separate systems.
This project is concerned initially with a domain analysis of the port components and their relations, and specifying the overall "backbone' architecture of an integrated system.
The objective in the first phase was to do the domain analysis and produce a specification of that domain. We expected to produce specifications of several component systems:
Later phases, possibly also involving other partners, will probably add financial management and executive information components, and elaborate components in more detail.
A major aim is to make the initial descriptions generic -- applicable to any port, perhaps river ports as well as sea ports.
The basic domain analysis was completed, concentrating on on ship and container management, and documented in UNU/IIST report 140 (postscript). For ships it deals with anchorages, berths and channels between them. For containers it deals with various storage areas and the movement of containers between them. We also consider the creation and execution of tasks, like berthing a ship, involving the allocation of various resources, such as channels, tugs and pilots.
The specification is presented using the RAISE Specification Language. The specification is modular and in structure follows the entity relations identified in the domain analysis.
| | | Port Management | |