Crafting our own data-rich future

Big Data seems to be the new oil and the new Promised Land, attracting attention and investment in our industry.

While I’m not a data scientist, I have used data for over 15 years to optimise port and terminal operations and I would say that we must do more to break down silos and to realise new operational paradigms to leverage data.

How can data make a real impact on the industry if we are still missing the basics on data accessibility and lack the necessary mindsets to drive collaboration?

Critical operational decisions continue to be taken in isolation. Real-time data transparency and visibility will challenge many current operational practices, practices which are often the core foundation for some port stakeholders who make money on inefficiencies and paper-based processes.

The big challenge will be how to drive change across the supply chain, to prove value and collaboration incentives and to make sure that everybody is a proactive part of the change.

We know what data can do for our industry and we need to stay positive; there is clear resolution on getting there. Data standardisation and connectivity across applications is becoming a common denominator for discussions and brainstorming, and important parties are coming together to discuss how to create solutions together.

We see huge investment within projects such as Monalisa from the European Union where collaborative decision making, or CDM, is promoted.

I was a ‘naïve’ PhD student 10 years ago who imagined that ports could work as airports in the near future. That future is almost here, but the basics are missing.

Captain Ben van Scherpenzeel, nautical development director at the Port of Rotterdam, recently highlighted the difficulties in obtaining specific information for Safe Port Memos and the importance of the timely sharing of critical operational events in a standardised fashion across the different software applications that support related processes.

He pointed out that proposed standards to exchange information must be aligned with the existing nautical standards of the International Hydrographic Office and the existing supply chain standards of GS1/ISO which are in place today in the logistics industry. Indeed, the Mona Lisa Project and the Port Call Optimization Taskforce are in contact with GS1 – a not-for-profit, international organisation that develops and maintains standards for supply and demand chains – to make vessel data standards an integrated part of the supply chain.

Co-ordination of functions to achieve timely, collective decisions is key in many operational areas. The potential of data will not be realised as long as decisions continue to be made in isolation. Data must ‘connect the dots’ across operational areas and time horizons.

Clean data

Automated decision making at container terminals is another important area of focus for software providers, which gets us back to two fundamental points already mentioned in this article. Firstly, the data feeding the different algorithms must be clean and meaningful, otherwise the most sophisticated and best performing of the algorithms will not produce an effective decision; and secondly, the human factor demands that users at the frontline need to understand and empathise with those decisions being taken automatically.

Real-time visibility and comprehensive visualisation of operational status and decision trees are also fundamental for people. Control centres at container terminals are evolving to be more process driven, which requires a totally different approach on user roles/expertise, information presentation and user interaction. User interaction must be simple, displaying relevant information by roles to drive proactive behaviour, showing only absolutely necessary information.

There is also huge potential for artificial intelligence and machine learning frameworks to identify patterns, record user interaction, propose actions and recommendations – they already have proven their value when applied to other human behaviour driving experiences, for example with aircraft pilots being trained with neuro-stimulation to improve piloting abilities.

In June in London, Richard Ceci, senior vice-president technology and projects at Virginia International Terminals, emphasised that while automated terminals rely on automated decisions to function properly, artificial intelligence can complement algorithms by identifying missing and/or inaccurate data, resulting in the finding of more efficient, pragmatic and quicker solutions.

Industrial Revolution v4.0 is promoting automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies. We don’t know yet what it will mean for our industry, but what we do know is that it must be an integrated and comprehensive transformation, led by a new generation of thinkers who challenge the status quo and the 30-plus years of best practices and technologies, and aspire to a global solution that involves all stakeholders to create an end-to-end and irreversible impact.

This operational intelligence in shipping will require streaming of data feeds and event data to deliver real-time analytic results, enabling the ability to make decisions and immediately act on these analytic insights, through manual or automated actions.

And when we will get there – and we will – a universe of opportunities will emerge; technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning will be applied and will create the impact that is already happening in other industries in companies such as Amazon, Paypal, Google and LinkedIn.

The future is not something we will be travelling to; the future we are talking about needs to be created.

Oscar Pernia is vice president, terminal operational innovation at ATOM@Labs at Navis, a team that applies lean and out-of-the-box thinking to software development.