Infrastructure changes of the sea passenger port based on a digital transport model

Marine passenger ports and terminals are key transport facilities that influence the development and positioning of a region, city or country. The port infrastructure should provide the world requirements in service of cruise and ferry ships, and ensure the efficiency and convenience in service of passengers and associated cargo flow. This circumstance determines the necessity of infrastructure modernization, and hardware and software renewal. At the same time, the existing equipment in ports and terminals is gradually becoming outdated, hence the necessity of modernization on the basis of development of a decision-making system. This decision-making system should no longer be based on analytical models, but on new digital transport models of sea passenger ports and terminals. These digital models must take into account both passenger handling processes and external processes for handling cruise and ferry ships. The model should have high computational power and take into account the influence of the external environment. These models should answer development forecasting questions and provide an accurate decision-making system for the validity of infrastructure changes. The Passenger Port of Saint Petersburg "Marine Façade” (St. Petersburg) was chosen as the subject of research. To construct a numerical model, port operation intensity, passenger, cruise and ferry vessel handling processes were investigated; port and terminal development strategies and the mutual influence of the "city-port" systems on each other were studied. As a result of the analysis, a new digital transport model of the sea passenger port was built, which has a high level of detail and accuracy of process implementation, high productivity and efficiency of analysis of various infrastructure changes in the port, allowing the inclusion of dynamic changes from the external environment. The numerical model has been fully implemented for this port, and new conclusions have been derived from it. The use of these new models allows justification of infrastructure upgrades and to study the position of the port in the region in relation to competitors' ports. The developed tool allows solving the problem of research on port processes at any level of planning and enables integration into the information systems already existing in ports and terminals.