Port of the Month
The port of the future is eerily quiet and empty. At Altenwerder, (in Hamburg) there’s none of the noise you’d expect at a busy container port. Instead of shouting longshoremen, beeping trucks, honking horns, and growling engines, there’s just the faint sound of gentle waves against the hulls of the ships and low horns of boats making their way along the Elbe.
As the Hong Kong Express takes on its Asia-bound load, the only human being nearby is a lone crane operator in a glass box 20 stories above the water. The crane slides on rails back and forth over the massive ship, manipulating a specially designed “spreader” claw to lift and shift container after container onto truncated trucks. Seemingly nothing but wheels and chassis, the trucks are missing a key element: drivers.
The central container area with a capacity of 30.000 TEU takes the largest part of the surface with connections for cooltainers. The area is served by 22 pairs of cranes and 53 vehicles. The characteristic of the terminal is the nearly fully automated operational sequence.
Altenwerder is one of the world’s few automated port facilities. Underneath the terminal’s blacktop, a grid of 19,000 sensors help guide driverless robot trucks - AGVs, or “Automated Guided Vehicles” along routes selected for maximum efficiency. The trucks are programmed to move containers from the shipside cranes to another set of cranes, which stack them according to when they’re scheduled to be picked up by trucks or loaded onto trains. “It’s all done by software,” says Karl Olaf Petters, a spokesman for Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG (HHLA), the company that runs Altenwerder and most of Hamburg’s other cargo terminals.
Ports and shipping companies are working to squeeze still more efficiencies out of an already mature system. Beginning last year, “dual-cycle” algorithms help Altenwerder’s cranes and AGVs load and unload ships simultaneously, reducing time in port to a minimum. The roustabouts, stevedores, and longshoremen who once populated the world’s docks and harbors have given way to engineers and computer specialists; HHLA employs more than 100 people in its IT department.
Source: Nautilus
