Dr. Julia PahlAssociate Professor
University of Southern Denmark
Odense, Denmark
julp@iti.sdu.dk
Maritime transport is fundamental for the global economy as it accounts for over 80% of the world’s trade. The Clydebank Declaration aims to establish six zero-emissions green corridors with entirely decarbonized maritime routes between two or more ports by 2025. Conversely, total emissions of the world fleet increased by 4,7% between 2020 and 2021.
Most ports serve ships on a first-come-first-served basis leading to inefficiencies and negative environmental impacts as vessels sail at a pre-defined speed to their destination port to potentially find port resources not ready forcing them to wait outside the port area at anchorage. Ships waiting outside the port area complicate port traffic including entering and exiting from the various terminals and increase risks for accidents. This is the case for all cargo types encompassing containers, roll-on-roll-off (roro) cargo, bulk, oil and gas. While port call operations for container and roro shipping are better to plan as ships work on predetermined routes with fixed port call frequency, tramp shipping is much more complicated as cargo shipping works on complex terms and their work routine like taxi-driving.
The orchestration of port traffic by providing real-time information of ship positions and estimated times of arrivals (ETAs) of ships as well as readiness notices of port resources and services is a challenge as a great number of stakeholders is involved in the port call process. For instance, ships need to have services ready at pilot boarding place such as pilotage and/or escort tugs. Beforehand, vessel tracking management services need to confirm or allow ships to enter the port area. The ship operator or ship agent is further responsible for requesting services when the ship is at berth ranging from services of quality control of cargo to fueling the ship and providing provisions to the crew. Moreover, documentation of cargo to be unloaded as well as customs declarations need to be exchanged.
The envisioned and required impact
Early and real-time information exchanging about ship arrivals and port and terminal resources readiness notices can save up to 21% of fuel of overall ship voyages as ships can decide to slow down to target an ETA at the pilot boarding place that allows them to sail at optimum fuel-consumption speed and thus eliminating waiting time at anchorage. Average anchorage times can account for 5-10% of a ship voyage duration while running auxiliary engines consuming ca. 15% of the voyage’s marine fuel. Thus, arriving “just-in-time” (JIT) does not only permit ships to sail slower and reduce fuel consumption, but also to eliminate anchorage-induced air pollution in port vicinity. Reducing fuel consumption on the ocean leg clearly comes to a benefit of the ship operator, but reduced waiting-time-induced fuel consumption in port vicinity comes to great enhancement of living conditions to people living and/or working in port vicinity and thus to society.
Enhancing port efficiency through better planning and execution of processes due to exchange of high-quality real-time data further permits to reduce energy consumption – now from the landside including the port, terminals, and hinterland traffic. Hinterland-based port-inbound road traffic could be aligned to more synchronized traffic by, e.g., providing trucks time slots when to approach the port or terminal gate area and/or directing cargo-trains to approach the unloading/loading station in such a way that cargo is ready just-in-time when ships berth to avoid congestion in the terminal. IMO requires 50% reductions of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) over 2008 levels by 2050 and air pollutants such as NOx, SOx, and particulate matters in port areas as well as 70% of CO2 emissions per transport.
How to achieve coordination and traffic orchestration?
The orchestration of traffic needs real-time information exchange to be able to coordinate the various activities. The European Commission pushes innovations further that permit coordination and collaboration among all stakeholders in the port call process and selected two projects in mid-2023 that aim to apply JIT principles to maritime logistics and to demonstrate the effects on GHG emissions and maritime safety. One of them is the MaritIme just in time optimiSatION (MISSION) project that will develop a digital voyage and port call optimization system as well as related functionalities to be integrated into existing IT-systems. In that way, collaboration between stakeholders should be possible to synchronize not only ship and berth schedules including ship speed optimization and navigation, but also port and terminal operations and services thus reducing fuel and energy consumption including GHG emissions on the one hand as well as enhancing (port) operational efficiency on the other hand.