In March 2020, the Technical University Berlin and five representatives of the port industry started the funded research project SELECT. The acronym “SELECT” stands for “Smarte Entscheidungsassistenz für Logistikketten der Binnenschifffahrt durch ETA-Prognosen” (engl.: “Smart decision-making assistance for logistics chains in inland shipping through ETA forecasts”). FleetMon has been chosen as the official AIS data provider.
The aim of the project is to develop an IT system for port operators and shipping companies that automatically and dynamically predicts the transport processes of inland vessels and thus their arrival times (ETA) at inland and seaports. The digital decision assistant is intended to enable the parties to take suitable actions in relation to the expected arrival time. It considers the entire logistical process flow. Reducing the vessel transit/travel times as well as increasing the handling capacities in inland ports are other important goals.
The research partners are supported by the BMVI (Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure) and receive funds amounting to around one million euros.
Additionally, FleetMon’s data have been used for the teaching course “Supply Chain Analytics” at the Technical University Berlin related to the SELECT project. Visit our Research & Development section to know more about the student case studies in the field of inland vessel ETA predictions.
Navigation in itself is a multi-century old phenomenon, which has been there since mankind discovered what they could do with a piece of wood. However, modern ship navigation has experienced a lot of changes, and subsequent ‘rebirths’, over the last couple of decades.
One such year of rebirth was 1952: For the very first time, vessel routing services got introduced into the industry. 1952 is when vessels were retrofitted with a prototype that would later evolve into the Automatic Identification System (AIS) in the late 90s, something that ushered a new era in maritime navigation so to speak.
AIS data, when clubbed together, gives us all-around insights into the vessel involved, its speed, position, ship dimensions, as well as its draft, helping us identify when the ship was loaded or unloaded with its designated cargo. However, the last point is an application of various data points obtained via AIS, and not available via raw data obtained from the systems onboard.
AIS, as stated above, was originally meant for ensuring navigational safety, but has quickly proved to be a vital source of business intelligence for maritime personnel.
It is the break of the Champions League final, giving me some time for a note (hoping for Manus wake up):
(most of the fixes are related to the last week introduced complete new object-id for vessels)
[*] fixed missing links to detail pages from Fleetmon
[*] fixed 404 errors on symlinked pages
[*] fixed links inside global kml file
[+] added UTC arrival date on vessel detail page
[+] added the ever missing ETA entry on vessel detail page
[+] Added new Coverage Flag in Vessel-Lists
[+] building the grounds for the soon available stations statistics (coverage measuring)
[-] excluded around 300 AIS land stations from the archive listings (until a naming scheme has been defined)
[-] clean up of old vessel entries, with missing parameters (reduced list, around 700, today = 61.075 vessels)
Game is up again, we will concentrate on the bigger screen now….and thanks to all very active uploaders of this busy week !
