  When planning to change operations at ports there are two key stake holders
with very different interests involved in the decision making processes. Port
operators are attentive to their standards, a smooth service flow and economic
viability while border agencies are concerned about national security. The time
taken for security checks often interferes with the compliance to service
standards that port operators would like to achieve. Decision support tools as
for example Cost-Benefit Analysis or Multi Criteria Analysis are useful helpers
to better understand the impact of changes to a system. They allow
investigating future scenarios and helping to find solutions that are
acceptable for all parties involved in port operations. In this paper we
evaluate two different modelling methods, namely scenario analysis and discrete
event simulation. These are useful for driving the decision support tools (i.e.
they provide the inputs the decision support tools require). Our aims are, on
the one hand, to guide the reader through the modelling processes and, on the
other hand, to demonstrate what kind of decision support information one can
obtain from the different modelling methods presented.
