An ICT Prototyping Framework for the "Port of the Future".

Davide Barasti,Martina Troscia,Paolo Pagano,Alexandr Tardo,Domenico Lattuca,Igor Barsanti

doi:10.3390/s22010246

Abstract

Seaports are genuine, intermodal hubs connecting seaways to inland transport links, such as roads and railways. Seaports are located at the focal point of institutional, industrial, and control activities in a jungle of interconnected information systems. System integration is setting considerable challenges when a group of independent providers are asked to implement complementary software functionalities. For this reason, seaports are the ideal playground where software is highly composite and tailored to a large variety of final users (from the so-called port communities). Although the target would be that of shaping the Port Authorities to be providers of (digital) innovation services, the state-of-the-art is still that of considering them as final users, or proxies of them. For this reason, we show how a canonical cloud, virtualizing a distributed architecture, can be structured to host different, possibly overlapped, tenants, slicing the information system at the infrastructure, platform, and software layers. Resources at the infrastructure and platform layers are shared so that a variety of independent applications can make use of the local calculus and access the data stored in a Data Lake. Such a cloud is adopted by the Port of Livorno as a rapid prototyping framework for the development and deployment of ICT innovation services. In order to demonstrate the versatility of this framework, three case studies relating to as many prototype ICT services (Navigation Safety, e-Freight, and Logistics) released within three industrial tenants are here presented and discussed.

Highlights

The vast majority of seaports are currently offering digital services to their user communities
We present the development of an ICT framework in Livorno targeting the aforementioned functionalities; the authors consider the actual setup as a promising example in the European Union (EU) panorama and present the results contained in this paper as a convincing proof of concept
Port of the Future is to provide easy access to the information submerged in a myriad of data already available to the Port Community System

Summary

Introduction

The vast majority of seaports are currently offering digital services to their user communities (the collective name for ocean carriers, hauliers, inter-modal carriers, shippers, freight forwarders, insurance companies, as well as institutional and control bodies). In the absence of a comprehensive standardization of seaport digital services [3], the best seaports have implemented fully customized solutions to provide their user communities with digital services, often delivered through a (private) cloud Frontier technologies such as 5G, Distributed Ledger Technologies, IoT, and Artificial Intelligence permit to include these digital services into an extended scope of their PCSs, supporting long-term strategic planning as well as observation and real-time response to critical events, including disasters. The Port Authorities are increasingly shaped as (digital) service providers As providers, they are requested to allocate resources (computing power, peripheral equipment such as networks and sensors), to authenticate users, and authorize access to specific data sets. They are requested to allocate resources (computing power, peripheral equipment such as networks and sensors), to authenticate users, and authorize access to specific data sets In such a perspective, Port Authorities would benefit from fulfilling the role of cloud service providers, rather than the one of resource proxy

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion