Challenges and Requirements of Seaport Informatization

With the globalization of world economy, trade liberalization and international transport market-oriented development, especially the development of modern logistics, seaport no longer only has traditional load and discharge, storage, transfer function, but becomes the catalyst for the development of region economic, trade, finance, produces enormous radiation functions to surrounding area and economic hinterland, promotes regional and world economic and trade development. In order to make full use of important node role to modern logistics supply chain, more and more seaports are developing into modern integrated logistics center. In such circumstances, seaports all over the world are in strict and orderly international economic networks, not only in the pursuit of high performance, also constantly seeking favorable competitive environment and competitive position. In various means of competition, seaport informatization construction is important for improving seaport management ability, promoting management modernization, changing operation mechanism, building modern seaport enterprise system, reducing cost efficiently, accelerating technology development process, enhancing market competition ability, raising economic benefits and other aspects, and is the breach of driving seaport work innovation and function upgrade.

In the process of participation in seaport informatization construction, Huawei recognized that seaport service development faces following challenges:

• Macro-scale vessels, deep water wharf and regular ship transportation require seaports to improve cargo handling efficiency and collection and distribution capability, and put forward higher requirement of response efficiency of scheduling IT system;
• 24/7 seaport operation continuity requires 24/7 reliable and uninterrupted IT services;
• In the grim situation of world safety and survival environment is affected by the terrorist attacks as well as environment pollution threat, seaport facility safety and security faces more challenges;
• Seaports competition trend is away from individual competition based on hinterland and goods supply, and towards integrated logistics chain competition, characterized by modern logistics, focusing on attracting ship lines and developing multimodal transportation, and providing information services and full service as chief means.

Seaport operators are to meet these challenges through port informatization construction, including information and communication facilities construction to guarantee seaport uninterrupted operation (these usually require 99.9% availability, including office and dispatch communication system, wired and wireless network infrastructure, IT application infrastructure etc.); seaport operation management system construction based on terminal operation system to improve seaport load and discharge efficiency and yarding efficiency, reduce operating costs and improve seaport performance; CCTV monitoring system construction to monitor terminal perimeter, production and operation situation in important area automatically, and guarantee seaport safety and security efficiently; business collaboration platform construction based on EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) system to provide data interchange and business collaboration services for terminal, shipper, consignee, forwarder, shipping line, customs and other shipping business stakeholders, improve overall performance of the maritime logistics chain, and provide more efficient and quality services to seaport customers.

Huawei Digital Seaport Solution

Solution Overview

Huawei fully understands seaport informatization construction claims from port operators, and provides Huawei digital port solution which creates overall blueprint of seaport informatization construction for them, including seaport service bearer network, data center, terminal operation system, terminal wireless dispatch system, port video surveillance system, desktop cloud, OA, E-mail, telepresence video meeting system and other sub-solution, and fully safeguards seaport secure, efficient, sustainable operation. The sketch of Huawei digital solution as following diagram:

Figure-1 Huawei Digital Seaport Solution Sketch

Solution Highlights

• High operation availability: seaport service bearer network has carrier-grade equipment availability, beyond 99.9% as IT-grade, up to 99.999%, and provides solid guarantee for uninterrupted seaport operation;
• Advanced system and strong customization ability: Huawei has a cooperative relationship with several terminal operation system software providers, whose software can meet terminal operation requirement on different throughput level and be customized according customer’s requirement;
• The innovative port wireless dispatch solution: Huawei provide innovative solution to bear voice trunking and TOS data service in one LTE network and achieve unified wireless UE management; unique RRU distributed BTS technology, achieves good wireless coverage over the port especially in container yard; reducing 90% field equipment and maintenance cost efficiently compared to WI-FI solution.

High Efficiency and Reliability Production Solution

The use of terminal operation system (TOS) has become the basis and guarantee of efficient port operation. In order to ensure TOS instruction dispatching accurately and up-to-date, port needs construct high stable, reliable and safe wired and wireless network, to guarantee uninterruptable voice communication and data exchange between operation center and important positions like quay crane driver, field commander, yard crane driver, truck driver and so on. Huawei port production solution (Figure 2) fully understands port customer requirement and bring customers following benefits:

• LTE bears voice trunking and data service meantime, unique network management, easier maintenance
• Provides telecom level 99.999% high reliability
• Network supports 9 kinds of QoS level, meet customer requirement, guarantees port service continuity

Figure-2 Huawei port production solution sketch

Intelligent Port Surveillance Solution Cover All Scenarios

Port management covers a large area, including the terminal gate，the quay crane field , container yard area, the border of port region, which makes the port security area is very large, so if we use artificial monitor mode, port security workload is huge and prone to occur security risks; Wired camera cannot be wiring on the quay crane equipment because it can be moved, so that the work of large machinery monitoring has been vacant, which affects the safety of the port production.

Huawei port surveillance solution (see Figure 3) using advanced intelligent video analysis platform and LTE-based wireless video backhaul solution to bring customers the following benefits:

• IVS Platform achieves Automatic identification of security events and alarm linkage, and improves surveillance efficiency and ability
• LTE network supports real time video transmission and customer can monitor quay crane’s operation
• Huawei unique coding and pumping frame storage technology can save 50% bandwidth and 30% storage space

Figure-3 Huawei port surveillance solution sketch

Port OA Solution Based on Desktop Cloud

Port company has many service people, and need a lot of OA PCs, but because of the dispersed PC computing resources and low utilization, it will impact port energy conservation work; Port communicates with business partners by telephone, Internet or telepresence system, such as port group, forward, ship agent and so on.

Huawei port OA solutions are based on desktop cloud (Figure 4), can efficiently solve the problem of the port office energy consumption and security, and bring customers the following benefits:

• Centralized deployment of computing and storage resources, achieves unified maintenance, improve efficiency
• Site to site encrypted tunnel, safe and reliable
• Cloud side provides unified deployment of security measures.
• Desktop cloud can save 20% energy, achieves environmental protection

Figure-4 Huawei port OA solution sketch

Why Huawei

Seaport informatization construction is important means for port operators to deal with challenge and enhance the seaport core competitiveness, so they take it very seriously and there are a lot of solutions in industry. But these solution has problems in practice, including lacking of unified planning and construction to lead to a variety of “isolated islands of information” and nothing useful for improve overall performance in some cases; certain ICT equipment is low availability in adverse seaport operating environment thus unable to meet demand for port operations; certain IT applications is slow iterations and poor customized ability thus unable to adapt to actual requirement; certain case is failure because equipments from different manufacturers can’t establish interconnected networks.

In contrast, if you choose the Huawei digital port solutions, you will get the following benefits:

• Save worry: Huawei digital seaport solution is a package of ICT solutions based on seaport industry characteristics, to meet informatization requirement of seaport with different visions or at different development stages; as the world’s leading manufacturer of information and communication equipment, Huawei ICT equipments with 99.999% carrier-grade high availability, fully meet seaport industry service requirement; in accordance with seaport adverse environment, the field equipments in solutions have the characteristics of waterproof, moistureproof, dustproof, anticorrosion and others, and provide solid guarantee for uninterrupted seaport operation;
• Save trouble: Huawei has industry’s most complete ICT product line and strong partner resource, so we have the ability to provide E2E solution best fit service requirement based on customer’s actual business practice, simplify the solution design and implementation, and accomplish rapid opening of seaport service;
• Save money: These high quality equipments independently developed by Huawei meet the requirement of green environment protection, save energy and emission to reduce operation costs, and realize unified equipment management and maintenance to reduce total cost of ownership efficiently.

Huawei digital seaport solution can create tailored blueprint of seaport informatization construction for your seaport, help you grasp core competitiveness in fierce competition and seize the high point of market.

If you have more questions, please contact document author: Alex Wang, Marketing & Solution Department, email: wangshihai@huawei.com