Port 4.0: What is a SmartPort

The global port sector is being driven by the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0 in its evolution towards the use of innovative and disruptive technologies that enable a significant increase in efficiency, thus fostering a more competitive position in the global international logistics market.

This evolution implies the transformation of traditional ports, understood as infrastructure providers, into digital solution providers for the entire supply chain community.

The Ports 4.0 (or Smart Ports) are a new generation of ports, driving and enabling the transition of the logistics-port sector to the 4.0 economy.

Are you familiar with the Ports 4.0 project?

LISDATA has been selected as a beneficiary

Called to assume an impartial data management and administration role, an honest intermediary (“honest broker”), Smart Ports represent a technological innovation laboratory or port lab for facilitating and improving the efficiency, security, and sustainability of trade and the logistics community, ultimately enhancing the competitiveness of the entire productive system and society in general.

For a port infrastructure to be considered 4.0 or “smart,” it must place innovation as the main driving force of its business strategy and be capable of integrating the physical infrastructure offering with the application of digital solutions based on new disruptive technologies that solve current challenges in terms of automation, connectivity, tracking, or artificial intelligence in transport and logistics management.

Some of the basic characteristics for a port to be defined as 4.0 or smart in infrastructure and service management are:

• Having all data structured through an Integrated Port System Control Platform in real time, which connects management in a standard way and integrates the different systems that are part of a port, such as access control, video surveillance circuit, berth allocation and stevedoring operations, signage, alarm system, etc.

• Possessing a central Operations Control Tower, with all systems integrated for centralized monitoring and management of the port’s status and activities carried out within it.

• Having the port-specific processes, information exchange, and services between the different public and private agents and operators digitalized.

• Articulating a Geolocated Network (and integrated into the Integrated Port System Control Platform) of all port assets for the management of plans by operators and real-time integration with BIM (Building Information Modeling) models.

• Performing Real-Time Data Analysis to generate new information from extracted data and calculate relevant KPIs, enabling conclusions for improved decision-making.

One of the pillars on which Ports 4.0 are based is the new data analysis and processing tools that allow for the optimization of port tasks and offer avenues for improvement to the parties involved in each of them.

Currently, almost all advanced analytics and business intelligence tools applicable in a Port 4.0 possess characteristics based on great ease of use and the ability to manage the entire data analysis cycle: from the initial phases of data extraction and conditioning from primary sources, to the generation of graphical environments and new conclusions for observing results.

Their main difference from traditional management software is that they do not require constant participation from IT specialists to define mathematical models or store and operate with data. Instead, the evolution towards Ports 4.0 relies on a series of technologies such as:

• IoT (Internet of Things): Interconnection with the internet of everyday objects and devices, and among themselves, with the capacity to generate, collect, and transmit data that allows for the monitoring, counting, and localization of the entire environment, enabling automated management of a multitude of processes and a huge increase in efficiency and optimization in terms of costs, expenses, and time savings.

• Big Data (Macrodatos in Spanish): refers to any dataset that, due to its large quantity, size, and diversity, exceeds the processing capabilities of traditional database management systems. Big Data analysis makes it possible to leverage structured, semi-structured, and unstructured databases to generate new useful conclusions and information, discover unknown patterns, trends, or correlations impossible to detect using previously employed methods.

• Artificial Intelligence: The ability of a machine to “understand” data from external sources, process this information in such a way that allows it to “learn” in order to perform a task, predict a trend, or execute decision-making. This “self-learning” capability is fed back through continuous and flexible iterations that compare actual results with forecasts or actions taken.

• Cobots or Collaborative Robotics: industrial automatons designed and programmed to work in cooperation with the Industry 4.0 worker. They are a new class of automatons defined by functional and design characteristics oriented towards interaction with humans on production lines and supply chains.

• Augmented Reality (AR): encompasses the set of technologies that enable a visual perception of reality enriched with graphical information and digital 3D elements in real time, providing improvements in communications, optimization, efficiency, and operational security.

• Cyber-physical systems: They have the ability to interact with physical objects to monitor and/or control available information from the virtual world, making it possible to learn and evolve with them.

• Blockchain: It is a data structure in which information is contained in blocks and in which metadata related to the block of the previous chain is stored in such a way that, through cryptographic methods, the information can only be modified if it is modified in all blocks of the chain, thus practically guaranteeing and verifying the security and integrity of data for all participants in the chain without the need for a central database applicable to all types of transactions, whether economic, documentary, or operational.

At LISDATA, we are data engineers specializing in logistics consulting. We have a department exclusively dedicated to port activities, from which we develop tailored solutions for each organization based on advanced data analytics and the application of new technologies for optimizing logistics processes.