ABSTRACT: Current development of the maritime transportation system, namely fleet and ports specialization, growth of vessel sizes, rationalization of routs, trade regionalization etc., has made many traditional approaches and calculation techniques practiced for many long years in port design procedures to be inadequate and insufficient. A generally acknowledged tool for this task today is the simulation technique. In the same time, modern object oriented simulation approach provides usually only ad hoc solution for a project. It lacks the generality that was the main and natural feature of its traditional analytical predecessors. Very high time and labor consumption of simulation comes to a conflict with a very narrow scope of the resulting model?s application domain. This paper describes a new approach used to create a simulation tool for the port designers and planners combining the universality and generality of the analytical (so called ?static?) methods with the efficiency and accuracy of the object-oriented simulation. The concept represented in the paper was implemented in the software product, which enabled to conduct experiments that proved the validity and adequacy of the model. The simulation tool was used in several sea port design project and now is a common instrument of several leading port design and consulting company in Russian Federation.

KEYWORDS: Ship Handling, Ship Manoeuvering, Port Operations, Service Quality, Berths Occupancy Assessment, Berthing, Simulation Technique, Object-Oriented Simulation

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