Port information systems have been recognized as integral parts of large scale, distributed and interconnected freight transport and trade information systems, whereupon infrastructures and e-services are continuously evolving, forming complex, dynamical, socio-technical systems. Developing and using unified and formal development and testing techniques to validate the emerging port technological and managerial solutions is a critical dimension for their future market adoption.

The advancement of the port information systems field depends on the integration and co-evolution of several parallel but complementary directions: namely infrastructure and terminal automation equipment developments; electronics, communication networks as well as the associated software technology advances; also models and algorithms required for port resources planning, management, operation and control (Crainic et al, 2009). Terminal Operating Systems (TOS) and Port Community Systems (PCS) have dominated the port applications scene, been developed by incorporating to a certain extent implications and emerging opportunities, as above mentioned. However, the increasing adoption of dynamical port applications and e-service systems along with advances in terminal automation calls for new approaches to ensure high efficiency and reliability. A number of data modeling, service modeling and simulation tools have been proposed for developing and testing specific freight transportation systems, whereas a single model cannot address all the important aspects of freight transportation and port node specific systems.

Against this background, modern service engineering techniques are viewed as applicable to support an integrated e-service and traffic modeling and simulation framework that allows us to examine the impact of various automation and information technologies and control strategies on freight transportation and port systems, in particular. Model Driven Development (MDD), Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Computing (SOC), as applied in the field of port and terminal environments, are valid design patterns for developing distributed, interoperable, autonomous systems, being it operational, planning, or simulation and control services of a port environment. Efforts to standardise the interoperability semantics of port services are also seen as highly beneficial to ease maintenance of, and partnerships with, collaborative systems. In our paper, we firstly introduce the concepts, definitions and constraints of current and future port information systems (TOS, PCS) and development techniques; following we propose a combination of MDD, SOA and SOC for managing a complete port service development and operation environment, as based on ontological engineering artifacts and Service Level Agreement (SLA) oriented policies which are defined at business and technical level and are guided by Key Performance Indicators (KPI) taxonomies and computational indexes. Various simulation models can be integrated in to such a unifying development framework in order to test and validate different port operational and control strategies of complex intermodal freight transportation problems.

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