| Summary: | When planning to change operations at ports there
are two key stake holders with very different interests
involved in the decision making processes. Port
operators are attentive to their standards, a smooth
service flow and economic viability while border
agencies are concerned about national security. The
time taken for security checks often interferes with the
compliance to service standards that port operators
would like to achieve.
Decision support tools as for example Cost-Benefit
Analysis or Multi Criteria Analysis are useful helpers to
better understand the impact of changes to a system.
They allow investigating future scenarios and helping to
find solutions that are acceptable for all parties involved
in port operations.
In this paper we evaluate two different modelling
methods, namely scenario analysis and discrete event
simulation. These are useful for driving the decision
support tools (i.e. they provide the inputs the decision
support tools require). Our aims are, on the one hand, to
guide the reader through the modelling processes and,
on the other hand, to demonstrate what kind of decision
support information one can obtain from the different
modelling methods presented.
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