AI helps Vancouver terminal create capacity, speed truck turns
Butted up to the edge of downtown Vancouver, there is little room for the second-biggest marine terminal at Canada’s largest port to expand. Yet DP World is boosting Centerm’s capacity by 66 percent despite increasing its footprint just 15 percent.
The modernization of the Centerm terminal shows how North American operators of land-constrained facilities can invest in new equipment, including two new quay cranes, and tap artificial intelligence (AI) to keep cargo moving faster to, in effect, create more functional capacity. When the expansion is complete in November, Centerm will have an annual capacity of 1.5 million TEU on just 81 acres, Maksim Mihic, CEO and general manager at DP World Canada, told JOC.com previously. DP World didn’t disclose the cost of the project.
The approach makes even more sense considering the last more than two years of port congestion. Clogged marine terminals often reduce how many daily turns — container pick-up, drop-offs, or both — drayage drivers can make. That hurt not only drayage providers’ consignees and shipper customers, but can encourage drivers to leave the market, reducing harbor trucking capacity. DP World’s Vancouver project also shows how terminal operators can gain functional capacity on a limited footprint without having to make massive investment in semi- or fully automated berth operations, a sore point — if not a flashpoint — for some longshore unions.
While relocating some older buildings helped free up space, it is the major rethinking of truck gates that freed up more terminal capacity. Centerm used to have 13 in-gates, four out-gates, and approximately 75 staging areas. Now, the facility has just four in-gates, two out-gates, and no staging areas.
That’s made possible by a fully automated process that clears truckers for security and gives drivers instructions for pick-up and drop-off — all in a single in-gate transaction. The “Optimal Character Recognition” (OCR) technology, which scans camera-collected images and then analyzes them via AI, has slashed the processing time from an average of 4.5 minutes to 45 seconds. Of the three Vancouver container terminals, Centerm has consistently outperformed the others in keeping the time in and out of facilities under an hour. In the first week of August, for example, 88 percent of drivers got out in and out of Centerm in under an hour, according to Vancouver Fraser Port Authority’s online port performance tracker.
Before the new truck gates came, truckers had to pick up the phone to communicate their appointment to check if they could retrieve a container sooner. The new process, built around truck visits rather than terminal appointments, allows truckers to complete up to six transactions — either pick-ups or drop-offs — without any intervention or assistance from a checker. If there are any security or commercial exceptions flagged by OCR, truckers are sent to a separate line where issues are addressed manually. In the future, truckers will be able to manage exceptions via a mobile app on their cell phones. Unsurprisingly, there hasn’t been any pushback from truckers over the new gates.
“Any technology that will increase their performance and their turnaround time they will accept,” Maksim said.
The modernization project also speeds up how Centerm can get railed containers in and out of the terminal. The terminal's rail footage has been expanded from 8,000 feet to 15,000 feet. That coupled with the replacement of rubber-tire gantry cranes (RTG) with five semi-automated rail-mounted gantry cranes (RMGs) allows the terminal to build longer unit trains, and in faster time, because it delivers containers from the yard straight to the rail track.
Just on the other side of that rail track lies hip breweries and cafés. When space is tight like that, only speeding up freight flow will create significant capacity.
