Research Partner in the Project: Seaports of the Future

Digitalisation for the seaport of the future with Cloud as the basis of Industry 4.0 standards

Axtrion is the digitalisation partner in the joint project for maritime economy | 1.9 Million Euro funding from Berlin for pioneering research in Bremen/Bremerhaven | Topic Port Logistics: Container handling and Offshore Wind Industry in focus.

Bremen, Bremerhaven, Berlin. Bremen is one of the world’s most powerful port and logistics locations. It is also regarded as an internationally recognized center of excellence in this field. Among other things, the transdisciplinary and multi-institutional cooperation with a constant transfer between science and industry here create a good climate for innovation, enabling pioneering research time and again. A good example of this is the new project “Process innovation through digital services for the seaport of the future” (ProDiS) with six partners in Bremen and Bremerhaven.

The three and a half year collaborative research project focuses on the optimization of processes at the seaport. It has a project volume of 2.4 million euros and is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research with 1.9 million Euro – German Aerospace Center (DLR) serves as the Project Sponsor. Research partners are the Bremen Institute for Production and Logistics (BIBA, Bremen), the Institute of Shipping Economics and Logistics (ISL, Bremen), the company Container-Service Friedrich Tiemann (Bremerhaven) and Kronschnabel and Franke specialists in heavy-load transport (Bremerhaven), the Logistics Service Agency (Bremerhaven) and Axtrion (Bremen) as an IT specialist for cloud solutions (Bremen).

“High innovation and optimization potential through digital services”

The optimization along the value-added chain plays a decisive role in the economic success of the logistics process design. The global networks and constantly growing demands as well as constantly new technological possibilities are challenging the industry enormously. Processes are becoming increasingly complex and confusing, digitalization and the better integration of services and an intensive use of new information and communication technologies is imperative. The ProDiS research shall help and increase the innovative capabilities also in the SMEs (small and medium enterprises) sector.

“The processes involved in the handling of goods in seaports offers a high scope for innovation and optimization potential that can be exploited with new digital services and their intelligent combination”, says Professor Dr.-Ing Klaus-Dieter Thoben of BIBA – Head of IKAP Divison. “For example, costs and schedule variances in most cases can only be reduced by process optimization – by the application of cross-company digital services for the planning and implementation”. The ProDiS project focuses on optimizing this potential and also the seaport handling of standardized units (containers), but also focuses especially on the turnaround for the offshore wind industry.