It’s Time To End Rush To Wait

Three weeks ago Turloch Mooney reported that the Hamburg Vessel Coordination Center (HVCC), which organises the shipping traffic visiting terminals at the Port of Hamburg, was looking into whether to continue with bilateral exchanges of information around port calls, or to replace it with a central data hub that would share planned and actual arrival and departure times for ships.

NAPA welcomes this kind of development wholeheartedly. As we've frequently noted in recent years, potentially as much as USD 18 billion is lost every year through poor schedule control, and communication bottlenecks between ports and vessels. Any development that can reduce ‘rush to wait’ losses, as well as decreasing GHG emissions and fuel costs should be strongly encouraged. 

One similar idea is the Sea Traffic Management (STM) initiative. It also looks to improve the scheduling of vessel arrivals into port, but also includesadditional features that improve safety, such as the inclusion of the full voyage plan. A good number of ports are already trialling this, and from what I've seen the initial results look very positive. Hopefully both of the above initiatives will improve the situation which virtual arrival is trying to solve from the commercial aspect.

The challenges caused by 'rush to wait' have always existed, but they've been compounded in recent years by the increase in size and volume of marine traffic and the demand for more efficient port operations. With less room for error, this can quickly create unexpected delays if something does not go as planned. Therefore improved prediction of the previous vessel port time combined with the port turnaround statistics has become more and more important to share with the ship operators in order to maximize their voyage efficiency and minimize the unnecessary emissions.

However avoiding ‘rush to wait’ is only one part of developing more efficient operations and reducing holistic waste. If you're to get consistently better results you need a rounded appraisal of a vessel’s performance characteristics. The top performing systems, such as NAPA Fleet Intelligence, include accurate, ship specific performance models that take account of the impending and prevailing weather conditions, and have state of the art routing optimisation to maximise voyage execution. Recent analyses we have carried out show that holistic voyage optimization combining all of this and just on time arrival has a savings potential of more than the USD 30 billion andequalling ~250 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

I should also note that earlier this year NAPA received major funding from INTENS, a VTT-coordinated Finnish research-industry collaborative consortium, to further enhance our work improving technical and operational performance and lowering ships’ emissions. We have already seen good results from this grant, and we expect to be able to deliver the benefits from it to any conventional vessel in 2019.