Containers in, people out

He points out that one of the most dangerous jobs is that of a tallyman, who has to get right under the cranes in order to make an inspection: “If you use technology as the eyes and ears of the system you can simply use one person in the control room, keeping them out of harm’s way.” He adds that though there are understandable union concerns about making yard roles redundant, the increase in safety associated with automation should come first.

Mr de Nooijer points out that the price, too, is dropping with the bar now at the €60,000 mark, “making it far more cost effective than even two years ago”.

But the crane driver is also a focus. “You need to be able to give the driver a sense of what he is doing and not try turning him into a robot. So, we are working on CCTV to help the driver get an idea of the next load in line, and metrics to show him the overall throughput rates – after all, they are often quite competitive.”

One added extra to gateway and crane OCR automation is that boxes are no longer invisible.

“The tracking system means each customer can log into the system and see photos tracking the history of the box through the port,” says Tomas Girdzevicius of Autepra. And in the case of damage, terminals can show the customer the exact state the box was in as it passed through its gates. “You can see how the container arrived from the ship, what state it was in as it left; there’s a complete trail of photographic evidence.”