In August 2017, less than a year after starting a pilot of its Port Optimizer data portal, the Port of Los Angeles and GE Transportation announced new agreements worth up to nearly $12 million to extend it to all container terminals and shipping lines, subject to review by the Los Angeles City Council.
One portal against up to forty websites
Smart port technology at Los Angeles began with a plain problem. Weston LaBar, executive director of the Harbor Trucking Association, said at the time that a trucking dispatcher may visit up to 40 websites a day just to coordinate cargo movement into the port complex. Port Optimizer gathered terminal data into a single portal. By February 2022, according to the port’s release on the new components, it showed truck turn times for all 12 container terminals in San Pedro Bay and gave visibility for 70% of the complex’s import data. Signal shows projected volumes three weeks out. Horizon forecasts cargo movement up to six months ahead.
The 8 to 12 percent efficiency gain the port anticipated in 2017 was a forecast based on pilot results, not a measured result of the rollout. Pilot users also asked for more terminals and shipping lines to be integrated.
These views describe the port. For a single box, a container lookup by number covers 240+ carriers.
Rotterdam plans dredging around the terminal calendar
The Port of Rotterdam Authority manages more than 12,500 hectares and owns about 89 kilometres of quay walls. IBM, Cisco, Esri and Axians work together to provide an IoT platform for it. Elsewhere the authority gives a mundane example of a sensor use: devices on waste containers and sewer gullies, so that they are emptied at the right time.
What touches a shipping line is berth maintenance. According to the authority’s page of September 2022, dredging costs on average 10% of terminal availability, and as a result vessels have to wait for the berth to be dredged to its original depth. The authority is developing a planning tool, Plato, that puts quay wall inspections, dredging and gauging on the same calendar as terminal planning, with less terminal downtime as the goal. Inspections are frequent and manual, the same page says (the Machine Learning Inspector project is meant to automate them).
Hamburg went after the junctions
Thousands of trucks drive through the port of Hamburg every day. The Hamburg Port Authority’s smartPORT gives anyone driving around the port personalised navigation with the traffic situation, parking and infrastructure information, and closures of the moveable bridges.
On the authority’s ITS projects page, project MOZART is described as a loop: sensors record port traffic, a traffic model forecasts volume at the intersections, and results such as longer green times are sent to the traffic lights. The authority says an optimization of that kind would take hours or days on conventional processors, so it uses quantum-inspired ones that return decisions in a few seconds. The stated aim is to commission the control at 5 intersections in the Neuhof area and on the main port route. According to the World Port Sustainability Program, the project began after a multi-year proof-of-concept phase and was completed in October 2024 after application in a test area, a heavy-traffic subnetwork of the port. Talks on scaling it across Hamburg’s traffic management are planned for 2025 to 2030.
What a shipper can use from this
Los Angeles and Hamburg publish information for outside users: truck turn times and projected volumes at Los Angeles, navigation for anyone driving in the port at Hamburg. Rotterdam’s sensor and planning pages describe the authority’s own maintenance and dredging work, and the port also lists Portbase, a Port Community System for administration and document flow. A shipper comparing smart port technology across ports can ask which of these views exist for the port in question, and treat a forecast, such as the 8 to 12 percent gain announced in 2017, as a forecast and look for the port’s later measured figures.
Frequently asked questions
Does Port Optimizer help truckers with empty containers?
Yes. According to the port's February 2022 release, Return Signal lets truckers know when and where to return empty containers.
What is Portbase in Rotterdam?
Portbase provides the Port Community System, a digital solution for the administration and document flow that comes with freight transport. The Port of Rotterdam lists greater efficiency, lower planning costs, more transparent planning, faster cargo handling and fewer errors as the benefits.
Why did Hamburg not simply add road capacity in the port?
The World Port Sustainability Program summary of the project says space in the port is limited and planning and construction take a long time, so extra capacity was not a viable fix. Traffic light controlled intersections had become the bottlenecks, and the project targets their signal timing.