A new digital Berth Planner tool to optimise allocation of berths at the Port of Gothenburg has gone live, a key step in the ongoing digitalisation of the port as a freight hub.
Allberth is the result of a collaboration project involving the Finnish technology company Awake.AI and the Gothenburg Port Authority, announced earlier this year. Port Control – which receives all calls at the Port of Gothenburg – will be the first to use this new service, along with the safety and security coordinators at the Energy Terminal. External users will gradually be invited to link with the system in the future, the partners said.
“With Allberth we now have a berth planning tool that can make calls smarter, safer, and considerably more efficient for all concerned. And reduced emissions from the vessels are an obvious benefit in climate terms,” added Fredrik Rauer, Traffic Coordinator and Project Leader for Berth Planner at the Gothenburg Port Authority.
“We can now use the same tool to examine the safety parameters to determine whether a ship can moor at a specific berth, to position the ship, and to plan the time. We can also show external parties the calls that have been coordinated with the terminal and the calls for which we only have an approved vessel notification.”
“Without this status distinction, it will appear as if we have two or three moored vessels overlapping and an outsider would logically put this down to scheduling problems. With Allberth we can give mooring personnel, the ship’s agent, and the terminal the opportunity to act immediately on the information that we visualise in the application.”
Allberth will offer two-way integration, both for in-house use by berth planning personnel at the Port of Gothenburg and for external use by the various parties involved in calls. Traffic coordinators at Port Control, safety and security coordinators at the Energy Terminal, and the port’s production planners will now have a schematic overview at their disposal using the software.
The developers liken the application to a traditional school timetable, where a note is made of which ships are moored at the different berths. Using the map service, a time slot is chosen for a specific berth, allowing operatives to see which vessel is due to moor at a particular berth at a particular time.
Allberth will also provide status information updates to external parties, including pilots, personnel at the mooring company, and the ship’s agent, to improve accuracy and predictability throughout the stakeholder ecosystem.
