An approach for designing robotized marine container terminals

Abstract

International transportation is rapidly growing. Even during the recent recession, trade growth percentages world-wide exceeded 5-10%. As a consequence, container handling capacity is rapidly growing as well. Larger vessels, bigger container terminals: it appears to be an on-going process of which the limits have not yet been reached. At the same time, there is an increasing emphasis on cost and environmental control, which forces terminal operators to search for innovative solutions. Solutions that require less space and cost less per handled container. Here robotization and automation come into play, as they allow reducing labour by a significant amount, and allow decreasing the space usage of a terminal by percentages up to 50%. However, this comes at a cost: the terminals that have implemented large-scale robotization and automation, have suffered from lower productivity than aimed for, as well as significant start-up problems. Many of these problems are on behalf of the terminal control software, as case research has shown us. In detail, we analysed the establishment of the ECT-DSL terminal in Rotterdam, which among others showed that: ? The occurrence rate of system failures had been underestimated, which led to inefficient recovery procedures. ? The time pressure in the project led to a focus on getting the system to run, instead of realising the functional specifications. This caused much of the specified functionality not to be implemented. ? The interfaces between various control system components were a result of a negotiation process between various design groups, instead of a rational architecture design. ? The terminal was used in a different way than planned by the terminal operator. ? The terminal was not designed from a holistic point of view, which led to sub-optimisation and components that did not work properly together. Besides, literature and other recent case studies taught us that: ? A large gap exists between functional design of automated terminals and the technical design and software realisation. ? There is a lack of interaction between the design of robotized equipment and its control software, leading to sub-optimisation of each component. Even the equipment design is fragmented, which leads to different solutions for similar problems. ? Too little attention is paid to the interaction between the operator of the automated system and the system. ? A gap exists between aggregate, strategic targets, like throughput volumes and vessel service times, and operational, day-to-day, hour-to-hour operational targets, such as quay crane productivity and truck service times. ? There are no tools available to provide insight into the operation of automated equipment and/or automated terminals, including solutions for process control systems. ? A common-off-the-shelve process control system (PCS) for automated terminals does not exist (yet), which increases the risk of realising an automated terminal. ? There is a lack of integration between cost analysis tools and performance analysis tools. ? Current design approaches do not address the activities after commissioning, apart from monitoring and post-evaluation. Thus, the container handling industry and in particular container terminals, are arrived at a point where new solutions are required; solutions that provide higher performance at lower cost and less space usage. Here, robotization and large-scale automation is the way to go. However, up to now, robotized terminal development has suffered from problems during and after the design-engineering process. Therefore, we defined the following objective for our research: To develop an approach for designing robotized, marine container terminals, which addresses the specific characteristics of such terminals, and considers the specific properties of terminal environments. We have explored and pursued this objective within the boundaries of marine, robotized container terminals. In our design process, we focus on