A Dutch port demonstrates how automation in the industry could work
This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.
U.S. ports could be facing another strike as the deadline looms next Wednesday to settle a union contract for 45,000 dockworkers on the East and Gulf coasts. A major sticking point has been automation.
Proponents argue that technology can make ports cleaner and more efficient; critics point to lost jobs, high costs and mixed productivity results.
While the cost-benefit analysis of port automation is complicated, there are places where the model appears to be succeeding, like Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
Rotterdam, Europe’s biggest port, sits at the mouth of the river Maas. It sees tens of thousands of ships arriving every year, bringing hundreds of millions of tons of cargo.
If you’re talking about automating port operations, it’s likely that fully automated Rotterdam will come up. But how does that work?
“I think you can safely say that the growth of the port of Rotterdam to, for a while, the biggest port in the world is largely due to the adoption of technology and the improvement of productivity, the increase of efficiency,” said Albert Veenstra, professor of trade and logistics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. “That is why we have been able to grab all this cargo that was available.”
Built on reclaimed land in the decades since the 1990s, the port’s terminals feature huge automatic cranes and battery-powered autonomous vehicles that deliver containers to the stack. They are some of the most advanced port operations in the world, and they’ve enabled Rotterdam’s container capacity to more than triple in the last 30 years.
“The new terminals which were built a decade ago, they were designed to accommodate the next generation of ships who have a width which doesn’t allow you to have a physical person in the cabin in the crane,” Veenstra explained. “So there you see that the growth of the system necessitated the introduction of a next step in the adoption of technology.”
But don’t make the mistake of thinking nobody works there.
“Even what they call in the press the fully automated terminal in Rotterdam at Maasvlakte 2, they still have 600 people working there,” said Niek Stam, secretary of FNV Havens, the biggest union in the Port of Rotterdam. “On the ECT terminal, which was developed in the early ’90s, there still work 1,100 dockworkers.”
Remote crane drivers, mechanics, lashing gangs, supervisors and troubleshooters on shore and on ship — there are plenty of jobs that humans still need to do. The change has been huge, though. Negotiating the transition, Stam said, hasn’t always been easy.
“Particularly the first phase, it was a strong fight. It was totally new,” Stam recalled. “And now the dockworkers know that if they’re talking about automation, they have already a lot of experience.
“Because we know what we can do, we know why automation is necessary or when it is overkill, and then we take our position.”
None of the terminal operators would talk to Marketplace, but they all have individual agreements with the unions. Change is still happening in Rotterdam, and those union agreements are ongoing.
“We foresee that in the future, trucks and barges, etc., will be all autonomous,” said Oscar van Veen, the port’s director of innovation. “We prefer them to not go stand in a queue. For us, it is not about getting the people out but getting the data in.”
Artificial intelligence, autonomous vessels — how all those developments are managed will be key to how much of Europe’s trade keeps flowing through Rotterdam.
“We’re looking at how to stabilize the energy grid, how can we make big calculations on how to plan the infrastructure of the future, really in the here and now up to the planning of 30 years and everywhere automization and digitization comes into play,” Van Veen added.
So even with the advanced automation already at the port, more changes are coming.
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