Science & Technology World

Ships could be in and out of European ports much quicker thanks to
smart software that monitors their movements. Developed for Dutch
firm Royal Dirkzwager, the monitoring system tracks ships almost in
real time. It will be used to tell ships to speed up or slow down to
ensure there is a berth for them to unload. As use of the system
increases, it hopes to cut costs, reduce fuel consumption and allow
ports to unload and service ships much faster. Ship spotters Founded
in 1872 , Royal Dirkzwager began by only monitoring ships that pass
in and out of Rotterdam in Holland. Information about ship movements
is valuable to governments, cargo handling companies and maintenance
firms. Paul Wieland, Dirkzwager's manager of logistics and ICT, said
it used to employ people equipped with binoculars to spot which
vessels were in port, which were waiting to unload and which had
just appeared over the horizon. The advent of automatic identification
systems ( AIS) made that job easier, he said, but still limited
Dirkzwager's ability to monitor movements. "We used to have
visibility of shore-to-sea of about 20 miles away from the receiving
station," said Mr Wieland. "But it was very short visibility of a
geographically limited part of the world." As ships move to adopt
space-based identification systems the view that Royal Dirkzwager
has of shipping has opened up enormously. "By interconnecting
networks and using space- based IS we can suddenly see the whole
world," said Mr Wieland. "That's an incredible increase in the
amount of data we can theoretically track and process with our
systems." It has meant a shift from 200 position reports every
second to more than 1 ,000. "We're going to monitoring every few
seconds rather than once a day," Mr Wieland told BBC News. "We were
simply not able to handle that amount of data." To help it cope Royal
Dirkzwager has just turned the key on a monitoring system that
automatically analyses a stream of data to pick out related events.
It is based on the work of former academic Giles Nelson who developed
the Apama software. Dr Nelson originally developed Apama for
financial institutions who had a need to swiftly route information to
key traders no matter where they were. Mr Wieland said Royal
Dirkzwager's monitoring system would help Rotterdam and other
European ports handle ships far faster. Rotterdam handles more than 30
,000 ships per year, he said, and any delay can be very costly.
"We're monitoring the journey of a ship to make sure it is going to a
port that has available berth space to accommodate that ship," said
Mr Wieland. "By following a ship we know when it's passed through
the Suez Canal and we can see it's going to arrive one day early and
that berth will not be free until the next day," he said. "If it's
too early you can, for example, slow it down instead of burning fuel
and arriving too early and taking up anchor space outside the
harbour." "Logistic processes in ports have speeded up." said Mr
Wieland. "The stay becomes shorter and shorter so information about
the arrival of a ship is absolutely critical." It is not just
businesses and governments that are keen to track ship movements,
said Mr Wieland. Royal Dirkzwager was also using it to drive an SMS
alert service for ship spotters who want to know when a particular
cruise liner is in port.