Service Oriented Architecture for Interoperable Port Systems

Abstract: Port Communities are characterized by being heterogeneous environments, with several actors and stakeholders and differing capabilities to handle information exchange and interoperability. To add complexity to this, changes in national and international legislations, for instance on security and customs, changes in customer requirements on tracking and tracing, and also changes in port organization put new requirements on the development and maintenance of interoperable ICT systems in Port Communities. Another challenge when developing complex ICT systems is the discontinuity found between different phases in the development process. We want to close the gap between the specification, implementation, validation and roll-out phases to ensure that a consistent system specification is reflected throughout the implementation of the system, and throughout its life cycle. This paper describes the EFFORTS methodology that supports a process model based approach to develop interoperable ICT systems in Port Communities. The methodology supports a development that clearly separates platform independent and platform specific parts, thus, it is suitable for specifying interoperable ICT systems. The EFFORTS Methodology is implemented in Enterprise Architect (EA) as a Template Model. This Template Model contains Standard Business Cases (the EFFORTS Toolbox), a Specification Model of an actual port ICT system (specified using UMM as Business Domain View, Business Requirements View and Business Transaction View by the developer of the actual system), and also documentation of the Design Model and Deployment Model (Platform Specific Parts). An advantage of the EFFORTS Methodology is that a large set of standard business cases and port processes (for example manifest distribution and berth allocation) is included in the EFFORTS Toolbox as actors, use cases, activities, classes, messages, and data elements. These elements can be used directly as-is when specifying the ICT system in a Specification Model, or they can be augmented and further changed to fit special requirements for the actual port community. The objective of obtaining enhanced interoperability within a Port Community clearly points to an efficient way of exchanging information. Today, all research and experience concludes that the way to do this is by implementing systems following the principles of service oriented architecture where the actors within a community send/receive and publish/subscribe to information by invoking services. These services are loosely coupled and data is transported in messages. This is the architectural foundation in the EFFORTS Methodology.

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