THE Port of Singapore is the busiest shipping terminal in the world. Each day
around 300 cargo ships glide in and out of the harbour to pick up and off-load
containers the size of single-decker buses. Every movement in the port is
choreographed by a sophisticated radar system and relayed to a control tower
that would not look out of place at an international airport.
Although Singapore is a tiny island, its port is a land of gargantuan
proportions. Giant insect-like cranes toil away at the quaysides, unloading
ships that can carry up to 1000 containers in only a few hours. Tractors twice
the size of conventional models transport the containers four at a time to a
dockyard where bridge cranes stack them seven-high like foothills to the
skyscraper peaks that crowd the Singapore skyline.
The Port of Singapore Authority, which runs the terminal, has ambitious
plans. To fight off growing competition from smaller ports in the region, the
PSA must continually improve the terminal鈥檚 efficiency. Now it is planning the
ultimate upgrade by automating the terminal almost entirely. In future, the
containers will be handled and transported by computer-controlled machines. The
world鈥檚 first automated port will cost around 拢3 billion and the first
phase, an automated container depot, will be ready by 1998. But whether it will
maintain Singapore鈥檚 position as the most important port in South East Asia
remains to be seen.
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The port鈥檚 popularity is partly explained by its position at the gateway
between the shipping lanes of East Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Rather than
call at numerous ports throughout the region, most of the big shipping lines
call only at Singapore, where their cargo is transferred to smaller feeder ships
for distribution to other ports. And as the tiger economies of Southeast Asia
have rapidly expanded, so too has the volume of container traffic passing
through Singapore. This has risen by 20 per cent every year since 1986, and last
year reached the equivalent of 12 million containers. To cope with further
increases, the PSA plans to reclaim over 3 square kilometres of land, build a
further 26 berths to add to the existing 29, and automate the container
terminal.
Maintaining its premier position will depend on the PSA鈥檚 ability to offer a
fast, efficient service at a competitive price. Singapore has the highest labour
costs in Southeast Asia and the PSA already employs some 3000 manual workers and
4000 office staff. Other ports in Malaysia and Thailand are now a significant
threat because of their cheap labour.
But the new terminal will be capable of handling an extra 5 million
containers per year with a workforce of only 500 full-time manual labourers.
Driverless vehicles will transport the containers from the quays to the terminal
where one of 16 remotely-controlled bridge cranes will recognise and stack them.
The entire process will take place without any human directly laying eyes on a
container.
The new terminal is part of an efficiency drive that has been quietly under
way for several years. For example, the PSA has virtually abolished paperwork.
Every container that is unloaded at Singapore must have a forwarding
destination, to be reached either by land or sea, a date for shipment and a
customs authorisation. In the past, coordinating the paperwork for a single ship
carrying hundreds of containers took at least a day and could only be completed
after docking.
In 1989, however, the PSA introduced a computer system called Portnet that
allows shipping lines to complete most of this documentation electronically
before the arriving ship enters the port.
As a result, small ships can now be turned around in as little as 4 hours,
while the bigger ships take up to 12 hours. A full day before the ship reaches
Singapore, Portnet knows the destination of each container, its length of stay
in the terminal and even its position in the bay of the ship. The PSA can then
work out the order in which to handle containers so that they can be unloaded
and stacked in the required sequence. 鈥淚t must be planned so that the last box
to leave is on the bottom. Any other position and it messes up the whole
system,鈥� says Eric Lui, PSA鈥檚 director of information systems.
Instant berthing
Another problem is that shipping lines demand instant access to berths to
prevent costly delays. In the past, the PSA gave the 13 biggest shipping lines
their own berths and developed a computer program that allocated berths to ships
taking into account the priority of the vessel, its draught and the yard cranes
available. In 1994, this allowed only 75 per cent of ships to dock as soon as
they arrived and limited the number of containers that could be handled to 65
per hour.
The containers can be transferred quickest when the large ships are berthed
next to the small feeder ships. In January, the PSA decided could improve
efficiency by allocating ships to any berth, including those from the smallest
lines, a system it calls the 鈥渧irtual port鈥�. By March, 95 per cent of ships were
berthed as soon as they entered the port and the container handling rate had
increased to 78 per hour.
The nerve centre for all this computing activity is the PSA control tower.
Here traffic controllers sit in front of banks of computers, studying radar
displays of traffic in the Singapore Strait. The controllers allocate anchorage
slots and deploy the port鈥檚 29 tugboats which pull the ships into berth. Other
screens list the hundreds of ships that will call at the port in the next 24
hours.
Planning each container鈥檚 journey through the port is a complex task. As each
ship approaches the port, the PSA鈥檚 computer determines the number of quay
cranes needed to load and unload it. It then decides the sequence in which the
containers should be moved using the information on the position of each
container to ensure that the ship remains stable. The order of work is
transmitted by radio from the control tower to the screens of PC terminals in
the cabin of each crane. 鈥淭he objective is to distribute work to each quay crane
evenly so that the vessel is allowed to sail in the shortest possible time,鈥�
says Phiong Shook Mei, a computer analyst at the PSA.
From here, the containers are either transported to another berth where they
are loaded directly onto a ship, taken to a dockyard for longer-term storage or
transported out of the port by lorry.
Computer navigation
Every day, around 2500 lorries enter the port to pick up or deliver
containers and the PSA ensures that overland transport is just as efficient as
its system for ships. Before entering the port, the drivers use an electronic
paging system to alert the PSA computer of their intention to pick up or deliver
a container. Each lorry is fitted with an electronic tag that allows the
computer to spot its approach and monitor its movements through the port.
The lorries enter the port via a 14-lane road. Each lane is monitored by a
closed-circuit television system, and as each lorry passes at a speed of around
5 kilometres per hour, an automatic container number recognition system looks
for the identification characters on the side of its container and matches them
with the Portnet database. The computer then issues instructions to the pager
saying where the driver must go once inside the gates. Each driver is through in
less than 30 seconds. Only one person is needed to staff the gates, in case the
lorries have trouble with their electronic tags.
The PSA is currently considering a similar system to identify containers as
they are lifted off a ship. But the containers coming from sea are often dirty
and their identification characters difficult to see or even rubbed off
entirely. Working outside introduces factors such as variable lighting. 鈥淭he
area where the lorries are filmed is covered so we can control the lighting,鈥�
says Vincent Lim, deputy director of operations at the terminal. And while the
lorries drive past through the entrance in a straight line, the trajectory of a
container as it is lifted of a ship is hard to predict and so difficult for a
television camera to follow. Even knowing where best on the crane to put a
camera is hard. 鈥淭his is a much more difficult problem,鈥� says Lim.
Despite this level of automation, however, workers are needed to operate the
quay cranes, the yard cranes and the lorries that transport the containers
around the yard. But things will be different inside the new container terminal
when it opens in 1998. For a start, most of the transporters that move the
containers between the quays and the container depot will be automatic. The PSA
is currently testing automatic guided vehicles (AGV) that will be directed by
the PSA computer, but will also able to navigate autonomously.
AGVs are already used at the port of Rotterdam where the vehicles navigate by
following radio signals from beacons placed at regular intervals throughout the
port. The radio beacons are expensive and the system is also slower than the PSA
would like. At Rotterdam, the vehicles have a maximum speed of 5 metres per
second, whereas the PSA wants a maximum of 7 metres per second (approximately 25
kilometres per hour).
To achieve this higher speed without radio beacons, the PSA has opted for
vehicles with an onboard navigational system that monitors speed and position by
looking for reflective tags embedded in the concrete road surfaces. 鈥淥ur system
requires more intelligence in the navigational software,鈥� says Lui. But the
biggest problem is recognising the tags. 鈥淏ecause the tags sometimes get dirty
we鈥檙e encountering reflection problems,鈥� he says. And tropical weather also
creates difficulties. Torrential downpours make the tags difficult to see while
puddles of water and oil create reflections that can confuse the onboard
computer. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a problem with pattern recognition. Our computers must be made
very smarter to cope,鈥� says Lim.
Once at the yards, the containers will be stacked nine high by remotely
controlled bridge cranes. These stacks will be huge. In the port of Hong Kong,
for example, the containers can only be stacked four high. Although the
extra-high stacking allows more containers to be stored in a given area, it also
makes the process of ordering the stacking more complicated. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not an easy
problem to solve but we can do it for stacks that are seven high. I don鈥檛 think
we will need a fundamental change in the computer logic,鈥� says Lim.
And there are other disadvantages too. The reclaimed land will more than
double the present size of the port to over 5 square kilometres. Wendy Lam Su
Lin, deputy manager of computer systems at the container terminal, says that
transporting containers around the port will take longer as a result. To get
around this, she is working on ways to choose berths for ships that are close to
the site where the containers will be stored. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not easy to cater for this.
We can鈥檛 delay berthing just to get a vessel closer to the yard,鈥� she says.
Another factor is cost. The PSA expects customers to pay more for improved
efficiency. Earlier this year, it increased tariffs at the port by an average of
10 per cent and reduced the length of free storage for containers from 14 days
to 9. Predictably, the shipping lines are not happy with the increases and some
worry that the tariffs will rise even higher. Patrick Phoon is director of
Evergreen and Uniglory Lines of Taiwan, one of the PSA鈥檚 biggest customers. 鈥淚
always advise the PSA that computerisation doesn鈥檛 necessarily equal
cost-savings,鈥� he says. The AGVs could be one example. 鈥淚t remains to be seen if
the value added by the AGVs will exceed the costs.鈥�
But Phoon admits that efficiency is the bottom line. 鈥淭o move a container
from A to B in 15 minutes instead of 30 minutes could save a lot of money.鈥� A
couple of years ago it took Evergreen an average of 13.2 days to complete the
transfer of cargo from a fully laden vessel to smaller ships for distribution to
other ports. By the end of last year this had dropped to 8.8 days, and since
January, with the introduction of the virtual port, it has fallen further to 7.3
days.
While these improvements are impressive, they are unlikely to prevent some
shipping lines defecting to other ports in the region. At the moment, 56 per
cent of the containers destined for Malaysia come through Singapore. But the
Malaysian government is putting pressure on shipping companies to call at its
new bulk container terminal at Port Klang. Thailand鈥檚 port of Laem Chabang is
also expanding quickly. By 1997 its handling capacity will be around 1.7
million containers per year, four times its capacity in 1994.
Mark Page, a consultant for Drewry Shipping Consultants based in London, says
Singapore will inevitably lose some of its market share, but he doubts it will
ever be unseated as the region鈥檚 main port. 鈥淭here鈥檚 no way there will be
another hub that can compare with Singapore. It has such a headstart鈥攁
track record of 20 years of hugely efficient trans-shipment.鈥�
But Phoon is less sanguine. 鈥淭he bad thing about ships is that all our assets
are floating assets,鈥� he says. 鈥淭oday I call here, tomorrow I鈥檓 gone.鈥�
