Ship time in port may be considered as an indicator of the performance of a port, and of a country, in order to compete in the international trade challenge. The general objective of the research concerns the development of a system of models that correlates the average ship times in port with various factors, or attributes, related to the port or to the country that hosts the port. The attributes are related, in general, to the position and role of the ports; the organization of the maritime services; the administration and legislation of the country to which the port belong; the material and immaterial infrastructures of the port; the port accessibility of the land side. The system of models proposed include models to evaluate maritime services, based on a network approach; to evaluate path choices of commercial vehicles travelling to/from the ports, based on discrete choice models; and to evaluate land use of the port hinterland, according to the smart paradigm. The developed models rely upon the Transport Systems Models theory, that in general simulate the interaction between transport users and (congested) networks generating flows and costs. The paper presents the methodological background and the expected results of the proposed system of models implemented inside the research project.