ABSTRACT
Since marine containers were first introduced by McLean in the 1950s, improving the efficiency of container terminals has captured the imagination of many, from top-level corporate management to stevedores, from PhDs in systems engineering to home brew inventors. Thousands of ideas big and small have been proposed to automate container terminals, but to date few have been fully implemented successfully. Why? Automation technologies that have been perfected in high-production manufacturing plants provide the basis of many of the automated containerized terminal concepts. Automated guided vehicles, machine vision, linear induction motors, crane stabilization systems, optical character recognition, radio frequency (RF) ID tags, artificial intelligence, stereovision, laser guidance, autonomous overhead crane systems, and 36Stewart platforms are all examples of technologies that have been successfully used in manufacturing plants and hold promise for automated container terminals. However, many technologies that work well in structured environments have found difficulty when moving from the controlled environments of the factory. In an efficient automated factory the temperature, humidity, and lighting are typically well controlled. Positioning and timing of product movement within an automated factory can be precise and crisp, allowing computers to control material handing devices effectively. In a container terminal, automated systems are exposed to sunlight, rain, snow, and temperature extremes. Containers, truckers, and vessels arrive to and depart from a terminal on a schedule, but the schedule is far from precise, often unpredictable. Container movements within a terminal are often chaotic, responding to the positioning of other cargo and the asynchronous arrival of vessels and trains, and depending on the availability of container handling equipment.
But technology is often not the issue. Perceived need, funding, technical risk versus operational reward, and timing have been the key factors regarding terminal automation.
This chapter will introduce a number of proposed container automation concepts to examine why they were or were not implemented. It is hoped that the lessons learned from past successes and failures will lead to many more successful automated container terminals in the future.
