Ports and Shipping conference – Highlights

AKQUINET presentation at the 10th Philippine Ports and Shipping 2019 conference in Manila

AKQUINET took part in a conference and trade show in the Philippines from February 19-21. The company’s exhibition booth highlighted its CHESSCON products for planning and optimizing container terminals in particular. Find Pictures from Philippine Ports and Shipping 2019 at the end of this article.

Prof. Holger Schütt, Managing Director of akquinet port consulting GmbH, also hosted the first three conference sessions:

• Developments in economy, trade and investment in the BIMP-EAGA region and identifying commercial opportunities
• Managing safety, security risks, and preventing accidents in ports
• Next-gen smart ports and creating economic value through port investment and expansion

where he welcomed top-level speakers from several countries (Hong Kong, Malaysia, Netherlands, Australia, Singapore) before the 150 international attendees.

Ports and shipping proactive planning and predictive maintenance

On the second day of the conference, he gave a talk on the subject “Proactive shift planning and predictive maintenance – That’s what you need for improving a terminal’s efficiency” in which he made the following recommendation to the audience: instead of spending more and more on new equipment, they should utilize the available equipment better.

• While today’s shift planning usually involves scheduling future shifts based on empirical values and then waiting in the control room to cope with the bottlenecks that occur, the proactive shift planning solution he presented can prevent these bottlenecks from happening at all.
• His approach to predictive maintenance planning is similar: in this solution, sensor data from the deployed device is examined continuously in a Big Data analytics framework, to predict potential failures. Thanks to this predictive maintenance, the devices can be maintained before they have the potential to fail and cause damage – ideally during lulls in turnover.

Both factors can help to utilize available devices more efficiently and minimize disturbances to the processes at a container terminal.

By Holger Schütt, managing director akquinet port consulting