Veniam helps container terminal drive real-time monitoring and operational efficiency

With nearly 90 percent of international trade carried by sea, the world’s shipping ports are an important element in the global supply chain, acting as a crucial link between sea and land transportation.

The growing volume of seaborne goods and passengers poses a huge challenge to efficient operational flow at today’s ports. The World Trade Organization has reported that the maritime shipping industry transports nearly $13 trillion in goods, or roughly 70 percent of total freight. When the industry fails to perform efficiently, the consequences can be significant.

Major gateway ports are experiencing persistent clogging as they grapple with congestion generated by larger ships, more containers and a growing number of trucks and mobile assets that must be controlled and coordinated.

In the U.S., for example, port slowdowns in California, Oregon and Washington cut U.S. gross domestic product by $40 billion in December 2014, alone, according to analysts at Deutsche Bank.

Ports must quickly respond to these challenges with adequate infrastructure, efficiency, provisions and services to meet throughput requirements in an environmentally friendly way.

To achieve this objective, port authorities, operators and stakeholders must deploy the most sophisticated solutions possible to support its logistics, plan its operations, track containers and move them within the port perimeter.

At the same time, they must continuously strive to make each process cheaper and more effective, thereby increasing port productivity, efficiency and security.

OverviewA port is a place where a coherent set of transportation operations and logistics processes must be performed. Ships come and go with people and containers full of goods, being those containers moved by cranes to/from the port terminals. Tugboats and speedboats follow the ships when they arrive/leave the port terminals. Trucks move containers until the containers stacks, and stackers are used to pull containers up and down between the stacks and trucks.

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Creating a Vehicular Enterprise Network for Ports and Logistics

Leixões Port Case Study

Through the Leixões port, goods and products are exported to 180 countries, using 60 different maritime container transportation firms

In 2013, 17M tons of goods and products enter/leave the port, serving 14M of inhabitants in the hinterland

550K containers/year are moved inside port boundaries

3500+ containers/day are moved inside port boundaries, reaching peaks of 5000+ containers/day

Stackers move 30 containers/hour, reaching peaks of 40 containers/hour

2000 trucks/day enter/leave the port

Each truck lasts 11 minutes to enter the port

Trucks remain 46 minutes inside port boundaries to perform a service

2600 ships/year dock in the port terminal, staying there for less than 1 dayContainers stay in the port terminal no more than 4 days

Leixões Port Activity Facts

Meanwhile, administrative and maintenance vehicles move around to coordinate operations.

Throughout these operations, the primary goal is to decrease shipping container load/unload times, thus increasing port throughput. The number and duration of port services can be optimized through real-time and remote monitoring of driver behavior, truck position data and engine status information, using unified communication and collaboration tools that allow port communities and their partners to use and share vital information (e.g., indication of the right route to follow, or notification to turn on/off a truck’s engine).

The environmental impact and security/safety-related aspects of operations also play a key role in the daily port routine. It is important to find innovative ways to reduce fuel consumption, noise and CO2 emissions from trucks that move inside the port, while also quickly detecting malfunctioning trucks and abnormal trucks circulation to avoid accidents.

ChallengesWithout a network to support the control of port transportation operations and logistics, ship information may get delayed to the control. Trucks may not be in the right place at the right time. Containers may be picked up by the wrong trucks and transported to the wrong locations. There may be long truck queues because of poorly coordinated operations. Stackers and/or cranes may not have the right information to pick up the containers, and several bottlenecks and inefficiencies may occur.

The traditional port-networking infrastructure, when available, is often dependent on cellular technologies for their connectivity and

data-gathering functions. This results in expensive data plans and poor coverage in dead zones between containers due to reduced signal propagation, as well as security and privacy bottlenecks raised by leveraging on telcos. When resorting to traditional Wi-Fi technology, installation/maintenance costs and wireless interference tend to increase, mainly due to the need for a high number of access points and their reduced coverage.

These network inefficiencies result in a lack of real-time connectivity and data to track, schedule and plan container transport and truck operations inside port terminals. They also make it difficult to coordinate operations among all various port players, resulting in delays, accidents and congestion that affect the port’s efficiency, safety and environmental impact.

“For the terminal, it is a dream to know each and every movement that is performed. But the reality is we do not know specifically the location of each truck that is carrying a specific container, or where our stacker machines are as they move around the terminal." - Nuno David, Deputy Operations Manager

SolutionVeniam developed NetPort™ to overcome the aforementioned operational challenges at today’s port terminals and other controlled spaces, such as airports, construction sites, large factories, mines or plants where there are many vehicles and moving machines. NetPort is a proprietary and game-changing solution for improving the productivity of these controlled spaces.

NetPort offers the possibility of connecting moving vehicles, containers, machines and control centers to each other and to Veniam access points that are linked to the internal networking infrastructure of the port. This ensures that all mobile workers and assets are securely connected, no matter where they are or at what speed they are moving.

Besides expanding a port’s existing enterprise coverage, NetPort also delivers real-time HD data™ for additional capabilities. NetPort

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enables reliable, secure, low-cost and fast connectivity with 10 times the range and 100 times faster connection setup than standard Wi-Fi solutions. Additionally, it enables port operators to deploy mesh-connected vehicles that can use real-time HD data for logistics, monitoring and surveillance to improve port operations and increase shipping throughput. The mobile mesh networking solution overcomes dead zones between metal containers with barriers to signal propagation, and leverages Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (together known as V2X) technology to enhance safety and security. In addition, NetPort offers the possibility of a secure service management system operating from a private Cloud.

“The workers can now provide, in real-time, the information to a port’s corporate and business applications regarding the operations they are doing. This means that the accounting of the operations’ time is much more accurate.” - Filipe Martins, Support & Communication Manager (IT)

ValueAs a proof-of-concept of the NetPort solution, Veniam established a successful partnership with Sardão Transportes, the trucking company responsible for all container transport inside the seaport of Leixões in Porto. Situated in the north of Portugal, Porto is northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, about 2½ miles to the north of the mouth of the Douro River. With 5 kilometers of docks serving more than 3,000 ships per year, Leixões port is one of the Portugal’s most relevant infrastructures for international commerce.

NetPort currently operates in 35 NetRiders that are installed on container trucks, tugboats and speedboats operating in the Leixões port. It also operates on Veniam access points, which together with the NetRiders form a vehicular mesh network connected to the backhaul infrastructure provided by the local port authority and port operator.

By establishing its mobile vehicular networking infrastructure across the entire port area, local port authorities and operators are now able to track every vehicle in the terminal at any moment in time. They also know what type of service it is performing, which container it is serving and where to place the delivery.

“People on the ground started from a situation where they did not have broad Internet access, besides the office, to a situation where they have access to the Internet, email, and corporate applications like ERP, document management systems and our main business applications. Thiswas a very important step forward, and it was immediately recognized as a very important feature for our workers."- Filipe Martins

Port employees are able to coordinate operations of mobile cranes, trucks and stackers with the ship arrivals and departures, and quickly detect and act upon operational bottlenecks. These and other capabilities are made possible through the ability to analyze terabytes of data collected from built-in sensors, on-board diagnostic (OBD) vehicle ports, and external sensors (e.g., pollution, noise) spread along the port area.

“Before, we needed one hour to complete the team and to start-up the engines; nowadays, we are always ready because we can access the port planning on time.” - Francisco Sequeira, Manager of Maritime Operations

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Veniam Container Port Terminal Benefits

Decrease the delay, manual errors and increase the accuracy of the logistics operations and invoices filling, by allowing the real-time and automatic registering of service details and port operations via the Internet and Intranet, without the need of radio communications between employees.

Increase the coordination among port entities and stakeholders, which can be used to optimize the scheduling of the containers dispatching services, thus decreasing the time a ship is docked in the port terminal.

No dependency on cellular technologies, avoiding the losing of port data privacy or the blocking of some services due to firewall/security policies.

Real-time tracking information (about vehicles positioning or hydrographic information) which can be used in favor of (1) decreasing queues of trucks, (2) having a priori knowledge of the best path a ship should follow to decrease its docking time, (3) knowing the number of vehicles involved in an accident to improve the security and emergency rescue services.

Extend the range of the Wi-Fi enterprise networks already deployed in ports, providing a seamless Internet access to vehicles’ occupants and surrounding harbor employees, with the same credentials and type of access as they are in their office.

Enable Internet access in places with difficult access or bad coverage, by leveraging on the multi-hop capabilities of the vehicular mesh network.

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