OptVerse AI Solver, Autonomous Driving Solution
Tianjin Port
Building a World-Class Smart Port
Tianjin Port
Building a World-Class
Smart Port
1981 saw the birth of China's first professional container terminal, spearheading a whole generation of modern container ports in the country. This landmark port was built and run by Tianjin Port Group, who in 2022 achieved 471 million tons of cargo throughput and 21.008 million TEUs of container through-put. It is now one of the world's top 10 ports, with more than 7% CAGR in the past four years.
For a port, time is money - a ship with 5,000 standard containers costs tens of thousands of dollars every hour it stays in port. If a port can mobilize and schedule people, cranes, trucks, ships, and cargo more efficiently, the reduced ship downtime will enhance its core competitiveness.
Good planning is halfway to success
Port operations planning is very complex. Past plans were manual and took 24 hours to cover berths, cranes, yards, and stowage. A hypothetical stowage plan needed to account for tonnage, size, and type of ship, arrival time, as well as crane capacity. For a 20-million annual container port like Tianjin Port, tens of millions of variables and constraints need to be considered.
In addition, a plan can only be developed three days in advance, making it difficult to respond to unexpected changes in weather or equipment. Manual planning cannot optimize collaboration among people, cranes, yards, trucks, ships, and cargo either.
Intelligent planning platform
Tianjin Port developed a next-generation system with Huawei Cloud OptVerse AI Solver. Thanks to trillions of combinations of results based on tens of millions of constraints and variables, operation planning is accelerated from 24 hours to 10 minutes for 7% less ship downtime. With this improved efficiency, a terminal with a throughput of 3 million standard containers increases its revenue by CNY29 million each year. The time is shortened, plan quality improved, and unexpected changes such as typhoons and equipment faults handled as well.
From
24
H to10
minTianjin Port also adopted an autonomous driving solution that features vehicle-cloud collaboration, which together with global scheduling unlocks a whole host of futureproof functions. These include precise positioning, path planning, and obstacle avoidance for intelligent guided vehicles (IGVs). Self-driving IGVs automatically adjust their route and speed to real-time cargo requirements and traffic conditions. Vehicles and devices from different vendors interact seamlessly, reducing conflict locking of multiple vehicles to less than 1‰ and improving traffic efficiency by 55%. IGV performance (22 MPH) matches human operations and far exceeds the industry average.
All these advanced technologies have made Tianjin Port an automated and intelligent port. These technologies have transformed Tianjin Port into a fully automated, intelligent port. Its 100 vehicles make up the world's largest driverless fleet. Running horizontal to the shoreline for two years, they have handled a total of 4 million+ twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs), witnessed a monthly peak of 80+ ship trips, and boosted shoreline utilization by 17%.
Driven by intelligence, Tianjin Port will curate more solutions with innovation to upgrade ports with big data, artificial intelligence, and 5G.