Customer: EU, GD VII Transport Programme

Duration: January 1996 – April 1999

The main objective of the project is to develop a generic operational and organisational framework (incorporating infrastructure, service and administration suggestions) for the efficient, reliable and flexible operation of small/medium sized ports (SMPs) as service centres for transshipment and distribution. SMPs are not approached merely as nodal points of the Trans-European Intermodal the Trans-European Intermodal Network (TEN) but, which is very important, as autonomous business units as well, i.e. as open systems of processes which must be effectively run and managed. The characteristics, requirements, bottlenecks and inefficiencies of these systems in terms of operation, organisation, communication and administration will be identified through questionnaires and interviews all over the EU, as well as a literature survey. The SMP processes will then be mapped and re-engineered taking into consideration the current advances in Information Technology (IT) and most notably telematics. This redesign will result to simpler, more effective, transparent and flexible processes and networks suitable to fully exploit IT competencies and to better serve the SMP users. The design of the new processes will reflect the general shift from push (supply-driven) to pull (demand-driven) structures.
Finally, an SMP operation simulation tool will be developed and the scenarios resulting from the re-engineering process will be simulated in order to be tested and evaluated in a virtual test site environment. The evaluation will be realised against specific performance parameters using Multi-Attribute Utility Analysis.

Role of TREDIT:
– Overall project management
– Identification of SMP users’ requirements
– SMP process re-engineering
– Simulator validation and calibration
– General guidelines for managing change