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Introduction

The foundation of the modern global economy is a simple metal box measuring 40 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 8.5 feet tall. Twenty Foot Equivalent Units,” the TEU, referring to the original baseline 20 foot container, is the basic unit of international trade flow statistics. A fleet of 5,500 ships with a consolidated capacity of 25 million TEUs carries 80 percent of all trade goods in the world. Moving freight in this manner first emerged in the 1950s, proved itself on a global scale on the back of Department of Defense contracts in the 1960s, and solidified as a fully integrated road, rail, and sea system in the 1970s. Containerization exploded in the 1990s and fundamentally altered the nature of the global economy. Companies throughout the world began sourcing materials and finished goods at much larger distances than in the past. Rather than redevelop busy traditional ports, terminals grew rapidly at new facilities built at then-smaller ports, like Savannah, or formerly commodity driven ports, like Los Angeles. As part of the endless desire for increased throughput in ever more congested ports, automation is frequently seen as an avenue to improved efficiency, longer working times, and reduced costs.

Compared with evolving or entirely new areas of technological innovation, like autonomous aerial systems, automation here is almost fully mature, widely deployed, and reaching the point of diminished areas of improvement. When the ECT Delta Terminal opened at Rotterdam in 1993, every aspect of the intra-port movement of containers was fully automated. Only the arrival at the terminal, either waterside or landside, was a manual process. Nearly 30 years later, there are almost 60 semi- or fully automated container terminals in the world. Just seven of these are in the US.

While there are other automation technologies available for other types of port operations, they tend to fall into two categories: shipboard systems that tend to be software driven systems to stabilize a tanker during the loading process or automated loading and unloading of bulk commodities, like automated discharge systems for coal or iron ore. Automation in container handling is a growing deployment of a variety of wholly new types of equipment in a largely labor-intensive process.

Additionally, these technologies fall into a different range than other emerging transportation technologies. They do not operate among the general public, being restricted to a constrained area that is occupied only by authorized vehicles and professional, skilled operators. As such, their safety regulation and safety thresholds are very different than a vehicle operating on the open road. The U.S. Maritime Administration has largely kept out of the regulatory arena and left matters up to the cities and states that operate the ports.

Despite the availability and deployment of automated systems, there is limited evidence that there are cost savings or efficiency improvements, particularly in terms of container handling. Role of a given port appears to be more relevant than the technologies involved.

Container Handling Technologies

Container handling is split into three phases: quayside, yard, and landside. There is some variation in how these are arranged, particularly yard operations, but these three operational areas form the basic pattern.

An inbound container is lifted off of the ship, loaded onto a horizontal vehicle. The horizontal vehicle moves the container to the storage yard, where lifting vehicles sort containers between different storage blocks consisting of dozens or hundreds of containers. Lifting vehicles then pull containers for the horizontal vehicles that move containers to landside road and rail terminals. Lift vehicles place containers on road chassis or on railcars for movement out of the port. The process is reversed for outbound shipments.

Horizontal vehicles and lifting vehicles are categories of different vehicles performing similar roles. These, together with the cranes, afford a variety of opportunities to introduce autonomous technologies.

Quayside Operations

Ship-to-Shore Quay Cranes

These are the very large cranes easily visible at any major container terminal in the world. They are typically 150 feet tall with a gantry reach of 130 feet and built in groups. Automating these machines has proven difficult. The ship itself is moving in multiple directions at once relative to the crane. Automated systems have not yet been able to match the skills that human operators bring to the process. There are no fully automated STS cranes anywhere in the world. Remotely piloted STS cranes, however, are common.

Storage Yard

Horizontal Vehicles

Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) & Automated Lifting Vehicles (ALVs)

AGVs/ALVs are basic wheeled vehicles designed to carry 2 20-foot containers or 1 40 or 45 foot container. They can be either diesel or battery powered. Navigation systems are variable, depending on customer preference and include embedded guide wires in the pavement, transponder-based reference grids, and satellite guidance. Despite the name, an ALV is considered a horizontal vehicle capable of lifting the container it carries into a storage rack. The only deployment of an AGV or ALV in the United States are the 50 Konecranes Gottwald AGVs at Long Beach. These AGVs use a transponder-based navigation, with a supplemental GPS-based geofenced safety system. Automated Straddle Carriers (Auto-SCs) & Automated Shuttle Carriers (AShC)

Auto-SCs and AShCs are rubber-tired gantry cranes. Like the ALVs, they are horizontal vehicles capable of lifting a container. They are similar machines, with the main difference being size. Auto-SCs are limited to stacking containers two high. AShCs can reach to four containers high. These machines place containers for larger cranes to stack in the storage blocks or to retrieve single containers pulled from the block for movement to the quayside or landside.

Two facilities in Los Angeles, TraPac and APMT, and Long Beach use the Kalmar Autostrad. Navigation can be either magnetic or a radar-based. The magnetic system registers positional data derived from magnets embedded in the pavement alongside an inertial measurement unit. Laser rangefinders assist with obstacle detection and avoidance. Other models can be equipped with a radar system, which navigates by pinging beacons on fixed locations (lighting masts, fence posts, etc.).

Automated Stacking Cranes (ASC)

The ASCs are much larger versions of the Auto-SCs and AShCs. ASCs come in two variants: Automated Rubber Tired Gantries (ARTGs) and Automated Rail Mounted Gantries (ARMGs). An ASC may span as many as 12 rows stacked 5 containers high. Maneuverability is limited because of their size and, as a result, only move forward and backwards on as many as 16 rubber tires or rails. These cranes receive containers from the horizontal vehicles to add to the storage blocks, sort containers in the blocks, and pull containers from storage blocks to transfer to horizontal vehicles.

All seven American automated terminals use ARMGs. For example, New York/New Jersey’s GCT Bayonne operates 20 Konecrane ARMGs to handle their truck terminal and the Port of Virginia has 116 ARMGs working at the Norfolk International and Virginia International Terminals

Landside Operations

Horizontal Vehicles

Auto-SCs and AShCs can be used to load and unload containers that have arrived or departed via trucks.  There are other types of vehicles that are used, such as large forklift-like reach stackers, but these are not automated.

Rail Gantries

These gantry cranes are the second only to the STS cranes in size. They are used to load containers onto trains and are themselves mounted on tracks running the full length of the railroad terminal. Shorter in height than similarly operating ARMGs, they are much wider to span numerous truck lanes, railroad tracks, and parking spots. Common deployments put them in teams to maximize the throughput in the rail terminal, with one gantry handling the unloading of an inbound train and another handling the loading of an outbond train.

These cranes are not automated, but remote operation is available. Terminals have been reluctant to explore automating these cranes. The process of loading and unloading railcars requires hands-on intervention to lock and unlock the mechanism that secures the containers to each other and to the railcar. Placing a human being between the railcar and an automated machine presents a safety issue that does not emerge in other phases of movement.

The gantries, due to their size and relatively small numbers, are custom built to the terminal’s layout. To compare, TraPac operates two rail gantries spanning eight railroad tracks, four road lanes, and a single row parking lot perpendicular to the tracks. The Mason ICTF gantries at Savannah cover nine tracks, two road lanes, and a single row parking lot perpendicular to the tracks.

Automated Gate Operations

Gate operations can be equipped with systems to automatically direct arriving trucks to the proper location for a pick-up or drop-off. Optical character recognition (OCR) or RFID systems identify an inbound truck or container. Lighted signs direct the driver to the appropriate unloading or loading spot without having to leave the truck or interact with any terminal personnel. Mis-scanned trucks are directed to humans for manual sorting. These scanners can also be deployed to track incoming railroad moves as well. Systems like these are commonly deployed at otherwise manual terminals too.

Positioning inside the loading bay is measured by lasers, indicating the exact position and orientation of the truck, allowing for accurate placement of the container on an empty trailer chassis or removing a container from the chassis by the ASC. This technology is ubiquitous and is even found in terminals where the horizontal vehicles are manually operated.

1. Relevant Parties a. Federal Maritime Commission b. MARAD c. Port Authorities - South Louisiana, Houston, Los Angeles/Long Beach, Port of New York/New Jersey, Savannah, Virginia Ports, Baltimore d. Labor Unions - ILWU, ILA, probably others? 2. Policy Issues a. Challenges to implementation - technological restraints b. Challenges to implementation - regulatory restraints c. Challenges to implementation - business justification d. Challenges to implementation - labor relations 3. The Negatives a. Efficiency issues b. Role in the global economy 4. Additional Readings and Information a. Don’t think this counts towards the word count 5.