Smartport Living Lab starts
The ports of Bremen are facing a variety of challenges. In order to remain competitive, port processes must be digitalized and automated. Bremen's port industry has already been working together with scientists from Bremen for many years. Another building block is now to be a Smartport Living Lab, with which five research institutes from Bremen and Bremerhaven want to jointly develop innovative solutions for the digitalized port of the future. The state of Bremen has approved funding of 2.8 million euros for the necessary infrastructure.
The scientists want to use this money to procure systems such as drones and walking robots for monitoring the condition of the port's superstructure or an autonomous ship demonstrator. By intelligently networking these systems via a cooperation platform, the aim is to optimize processes in the port and increase the safety and resilience of (digital) infrastructures in maritime logistics. To this end, the scientists want to apply for and carry out projects together with the port industry in order to transfer the scientific findings into practical applications as quickly as possible.
The Bremen research institutions involved in the project are BIBA - Bremen Institute of Production and Logistics, the Institute of Shipping Economics and Logistics (ISL), TOPAS Industriemathematik Innovation, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Bremerhaven.
With its focus on process optimization and resilience, ISL focuses on the procurement of technologies and software for modelling and optimizing processes in maritime logistics and strengthening port security. For the strategic planning of port processes and port monitoring, the new infrastructure will be used in future projects to research and test the use of digital twins in addition to simulation applications. The procurement of a large video screen and AR/VR technology will enable the presentation/visualization and analysis of logistical processes and innovations in the future. This is supported by the use of flying drones and a walking robot as sensor platforms, which generate data, for example through the use of imaging sensors (optical and infrared) and LiDAR, which can be processed and analyzed in research questions on traffic situation mapping and AI-supported detection and identification of safety-relevant anomalies in the port environment, among other things. A mobile control station based on a van will be used to control the drones and walking robots on site.
