On April 26, 1956, an aging vessel named the Ideal X, berthed in the port of Newark, loaded with 58 containers. It reached the port of Houston five days later where a long queue of trucks waited to haul the containers to their destination. The advantages of transporting freight in an unglamorous box were soon acknowledged and resulted in other technical innovations in the wider port logistical field. Keith Tantlinger filed no less than 12 patents all linked to various artefacts ranging from container design refinements to cranes and spreaders, thus a system called containerisation was born. According to Marc Levinson, (author of The Box – How the container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger) this not only marks the genesis of containerisation as an integrated system, but the start of a silent revolution in international trade. The diffusion of this technology rapidly produced sizable macro-economic effects which spurred international trade and connected fragmented markets, similar to the effect of railroads for national markets in the nineteenth century. Today, it is estimated that around 350 million containers are at use globally.
The constant increase in the global volume of trade in containerised form exerts increasing pressure on ports and port logistics. As a result, port container terminals find themselves buckled by pressures of efficiency and the inability to respond to the demands of the dynamic world of seaborne trade. Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) reflect the automation processes that have been adopted by large ports such as Dusseldorf and Rotterdam as a response to this pressure. These unmanned transport vehicles have proved their ability to improve traffic management and have evolved in their operational efficiency. However, this response remains insufficient and infeasible for different port sizes. Insufficient because the routing of containers must follow fixed routes based on embedded transponders in the infrastructure, making it difficult to achieve productivity gains in small to medium ports; infeasible because such infrastructure requires huge investments which these ports cannot afford.
The European commission points to the urgent need to make small to medium ports and their adjacent urban towns more competitive by acknowledging both the impact and benefits of modern technologies on socio-economic development. In its ‘Freight Transport Logistics Action Plan’ [COM (2007) 607] the European Commission contends that “the deployment of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) which help better manage infrastructure and transport operations is slow”. Such systems can contribute substantially to cleaner and safer operations. A recent legal framework (Directive 2010/40/EU) was adopted in 2010 to speed up the dissemination and use of these innovative transport technologies across Europe.
In this context, InTraDE (Intelligent Transportation for Dynamic Environment) project, co-funded by European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under the Interreg IVB NWE (North West Europe region) programme represents a hi-tech solution that fits the legal framework directive of the EU. Its aim is to develop an innovative means of transport that is intelligent, autonomous, clean and modular in architecture (i.e. Intelligent Autonomous Vehicle – IAV) but also to develop a new approach to handle congestion and space utilisation in ports and confined spaces. Adopting the IAV concept for the conveyance of different types of freight is a feature that is both appealing and feasible for future application in small and medium size ports, thus improving their competitiveness through enhanced efficiency.
InTraDE achieved the following objectives through a transnational collaboration with its partners:
(1) conducted studies on traffic flow within confined spaces of container terminals and identified the factors influencing the overall productivity of such facilities; investigated existing traffic control methods and developed new methods to improve efficiency whilst ensuring safety;
(2) identified automatic navigation methods and developed new algorithms for robust supervision, and investigated practical issues in implementing an automatic navigation system in container terminals;
(3) developed an automatic traffic time-domain simulator for autonomous and manned vehicles to carried out a design case study of terminal layout using simulation tools;
(4) designed, tested and validated an IAV prototype inside port terminals in the NWE region and combined urban-confined spaces.
The developed electrically powered IAV prototype, the supervision platform and the virtual simulator together form an integrated ITS, thus representing a technological innovation which will benefit from the availability of small to medium ports of the NWE region as initial test zones. The ports of Le Havre, Rouen-Radicatel, Dublin and Oostende contribute significantly to the preparation of this action. The objective is to assess the transferability of this novel technology and its viable impacts from operational, social and economic perspectives. According to Professor Rochdi Merzouki the scientist responsible for the inception of InTraDE in Université de Lille 1, “the forthcoming port pilot tests will allow the InTraDE team to draw a full assessment of the functionality and viability of the IAV and demonstrate its superiority to AGVs.” The results of the pilot tests will help improve the technological specifications of the ITS and assess the possibilities of its adoption for multi-modal transport systems.
The newly developed ITS offers the possibility to tackle future challenges such as congestion, and CO2 pollution reductions, while adressing the limits associated with existing transport infrastructure, in particular AGVs. Such limits are associated with pollution from their diesel engines, the cost of setting the infrastructure for their operation, and the way they utilise space, since they can only follow predetermined routes. The aggregate effects of these limits translate into a reduction in productivity and competitivity. An AGV is designed to work in a controlled environment separate from manned operations (see table 1 for a detailed comparison), whereas the IAV can be viewed as a “field robot.” It is an “over-actuated” vehicle which uses multiple sensors for control and navigation allowing it to function in various environments.
With a hybrid drive option (automatic and manned) and battery power, the InTraDE IAV named “RobuTainer” is able to navigate remotely. It can operate unmanned without rails or ground infrastructure. This makes it environmentally effective and extremely flexible highlighting yet another advantage over the diesel powered AGV. Notwithstanding the fact that the use of diesel powered AGVs and reach stackers for the handling and routing of containers is responsible for significant pollution outputs not only in port environments but also in their adjacent urban areas.
The development of the IAV-based ITS system is founded on the unification of three research themes. The first concerns the design of an IAV prototype from a purely technical point of view, and the definition of its components for hardware architecture while ensuring functional reliability, dependability, diagnosis and maintainability of the system, not to forget its flexibility since it is able to move in all directions thanks to its modular architecture and omni-directional steering system which provide three degrees of freedom: longitudinal, lateral and yaw.
The second theme is the supervision system which monitors the vehicle’s movements in real time, using data acquired from its onboard sensors. GPS, Wi-Fi, radio, laser telemeters and odometers links allow the identification of the position, trajectory and functional condition of each IAV. Thus, the trajectory of the IAV can always be compared with the real-time plan and the monitoring system will cover different tasks, namely the preparation of miss
ions, real-time monitoring of movements and, of course, data management of the vehicle.
In addition, the simulation platform is used in conjunction with the various possibilities offered by the “RobuTainer” as a simulation tool for different scenarios in port areas. Therefore, it becomes imperative to determine the operations that achieve the best efficiencies and productivity gains, but also to quantify the optimal number of logistical elements such as cranes, number of IAVs, tables (or cassettes) and to optimise their use in terms of time, calculation of optimal trajectory in normal, degraded and faulty situations, space management…etc.
In this context, the idea of ??using tables (cassettes) to ensure flexibility and adaptability in the transport of containers allows the exploitation of “RobuTainer” in different ways, but raises a new issue. Indeed, the study of the number of IAVs, the number of cassettes, and the use of a train of IAVs (platooning) offers yet an additional advantage over the AGV. IAVs can follow each other like a train without being coupled physically, and are able to continue their mission towards a given destination even in the case of an IAV’s system fault in the platoon. This makes it possible for an IAV to reconfigure itself and continue operation in a degraded mode. A similar scenario with the AGV system is not only infeasible but can lead to a complete halt.
It was important to develop, implement and validate algorithms for supervision and diagnosis of IAVs, thus providing the means to ensure their functional reconfiguration in the case of faults, but also to be able to define the different modes of operation. Indeed, a supervision system expressing the state of an IAV should be considered by a given operator in terms of available functional possibilities and services; hence, the importance of combining functional and behavioral approaches to define the various operating modes through “fault detection and isolation” (FDI), and this represents the third theme of the project making it yet another qualifying advantage over the AGV system.