Introduction
Ports are extremely important to the Indian economy and play a vital role in sustaining growth in the country's trade and commerce. According to the Ministry of Shipping, around 95% of India's trading by volume and 70% by value is done through maritime transport. India has 12 major and 205 notified minor and intermediate ports. Ports need to deal with a number of activities like the movement of ships, containers, cargo, vehicles, manpower and equipment. Activities like transportation, loading, unloading and storage of cargo require the use of a huge number of equipment like trucks, trailers, container cranes, straddle carriers, reach stackers, forklifts, bulk grabs, hoppers etc. The area of operations of ports generally extends to several square kilometres both onshore and offshore comprising berths, roads, parking, storage spaces and administrative buildings. The Government of India plans to modernize seaports to improve traffic operations and enhance security by removing bottlenecks for seamless movement of traffic within the port to ensure tracking & tracing of man, material, vehicle, equipment, and other assets.
mroads is a technology company founded in 2011 in Plano, TX, USA and grown into an organization that provides services to clients across the globe. mroads provides an end-to-end engagement model, fostering a collaborative relationship with its clients. mroads combine domain knowledge with technology to create innovative, digitally-led, transformational solutions for our clients across different industries, enabling businesses in hospitality, travel, banking, financial services, manufacturing, retail, consumer packaged goods, shipping/logistics, ports and healthcare. With extensive experience in technology and software development, mroads is strategically placed as a partner that provides solutions in all areas of technology. Backed by experienced management, mroads offers great client experiences through world-class workforce solutions and dedicated business units.
Problem
Thousands of vehicles moving in and out of the port premises with different kinds of work. At present all the operations of gate entry/ exit, tracking the vehicles, speed limit enforcement, schedule and route restrictions are done manually. Once the vehicle enters the port premises, the only way to monitor the vehicle is through manual intervention. Personnel have to physically reach the vehicle to check the vehicle's activity. This will become an extremely challenging and near impossible task considering the large area of operations, a huge number of vehicles, limited manpower and the security implications. Considering the sensitive nature of ports and the above issues, management of a large number of vehicles manually is error-prone, time-consuming, insufficient, inefficient and a security menace. The huge number of vehicles results in traffic congestion, pollution, security lapses, time delays and management nightmare for the port personnel on the ground affecting the overall efficiency of the port.
Vehicles after entering the port premises might take the same route causing over capacity or overstaying their permitted time thus causing congestion at decks, berths and roads and long delays affecting the turnaround time. Goods can be picked from the wrong location intentionally/unintentionally leading to further chaos for port operations.
Solution
The solution is based on the integration of mroads GPS tracking device and our custom GPS tracking software to get the precise location, speed, timestamp and other parameters of the vehicle in real-time. In-built algorithms can then be applied to the incoming data to deduce vehicle behavior and propose valuable information.
Virtual fences called Geofences are created using our software based on the geospatial maps of the premises. Geofencing allows for defining and labeling areas and roads in which vehicles operate using polylines, polygons and circles. The entire map of the port premises is fed into the system and all landmarks, roads and zones are created in the software. Predefined rules can be created to manage the permitted and forbidden behavior of vehicles in the specified geofenced areas.
Every vehicle seeking to enter the port premises will be installed with a mroads GPS tracking device on the dashboard connected to a power source. Each device will have a unique 15-digit IMEI identifier, that will be relayed to the telecommunications network along with other crucial data in real-time. The details of the GPS device (IMEI number) will be mapped to the Registration number of the vehicle in the tracking software. Once the vehicle arrives at the Entry gate with a valid permit, the operator can search the vehicle details using the vehicle registration number and configure the time permitted to stay in the port, destination and scheduled stops. The manual intervention looking up the vehicle details can be avoided if a RFID-enabled access control system is in place.
Once the vehicle enters/exits the premises (i.e. crosses the virtual fence), an automatic event is registered in the system with the timestamp to mark the start of the journey and the control room can start tracking the vehicle.
Any vehicle entering the port is usually given a fixed period of time to stay on the premises. This might happen due to a lack of awareness on the part of the driver and could be intentional. When the vehicle overstays its permitted time period, the control room will be alerted. The operators can either call the driver to warn him or a penalty can be imposed during the exit.
All the roads within the premises are configured into the GPS tracking software using geofences. As the destination is already configured for the vehicle, the tracking software is aware of all possible routes a vehicle can take to arrive at the destination. Any vehicle that takes a wrong route or gets off the expected route by any fixed length (can be configured in the system. Ex: 5m) will be highlighted in red and appropriate notification in the form of SMS/Email/Web/Push will be sent to concerned people.
Each individual area within the premises that serves a particular purpose is demarcated using Geofencing and labeled (e.g.: import, export, storage, oil, traffic, customs, defense). A vehicle during its entry will be given a final destination area and possible stopovers. If the vehicle for whatever reason enters a zone that it is not supposed to enter, a red flag will be raised and appropriate notification in the form of SMS/Email/Web/Push will be sent.
The GPS tracker continuously relays both the coordinates and the speed to servers and a detailed log of overspeeding instances will be saved in the database and appropriate action can be taken by the authorities.
The control room can view all the vehicles within the premises in real-time and identify potential traffic bottlenecks. The GPS software is designed to predict and warn the control room about any impending traffic congestion.
Summary
Provision of adequate tracking/tracing systems within the port to regulate vehicular movement and mitigate any untoward incident is of paramount importance to improve the efficiency and security of the port. Our solution will increase trade significantly because of the operational efficiency achieved by removing the manual intervention.
As with any mroads solution, each should stand the acid test of our philosophy, “Improving the lives of people with technology and awareness”. Each organization can transform with the ability to manage its entire fleet operations in real-time and keep the customers informed proactively. We would improve the operational efficiency with real-time guiding and tracking. This will help in reducing carbon footprint contribution significantly. Tracking solution that is a scalable one that will keep the efficiency/objectives intact at large-scale deployments. Our solution should be able to improve the dwell time at the ports by 10%.
