ON THE SELECTION OF THE FORMAT FOR THE CONTAINER TERMINAL SIMULATION MODEL’S STRUCTURE
The paper deals with the analyses of the reasons that turned the simulation from a direction of theoretical researches into a practical tool of modern technologic design. The first results gained by this new paradigm made simulation to be an obligatorily component of any infrastructural project in the area of transport industry. Large investment projects today require the support and maintenance of highly advanced computer models, whose existence was made possible as the result of software engineering development, achievements of computer sciences and progress in hardware. The new level of detalisation and new opportunities offered by the modern generation of simulation models totally change the perception of the content and functional profile of project decisions expected from the designers. The extended horizons of evaluations of the variety of project parameters and a new level of quality of the sensitivity analyses of the output values to the external disturbances, fluctuations of the project constants, alternations of the inner and outer constrains enable to reduce considerably the investment risks connected with large infrastructural projects. In the same time, high labor consumption, narrow specialization and rigid orientation on the inner functional structure of the simulated object make the instrument of simulation rather poorly fitted for the technological design goals and objectives which are principally assume many variants and data volatility. The study concludes the main gnoseologic reason for this inadequacy and the loss of models’ universality is in inadequate format of the functional structure of the simulated object, container terminal of a general appearance. A generic solution of this problem is offered by the use of the general format of this structure’s representation with analytic list form of the relevant structural graph.