Flinders Port Holdings’ (FPH) vision is to connect South Australia to the world. FPH is committed to developing sustainable business practices that aim to deliver long-term value for all of our stakeholders. We aim to create supply chain solutions for customers to deliver faster distribution times, provide greater accessibility and capacity, reduce environment and social impact, reduce risk and increase efficiencies. FPH has identified that to achieve our vision, we must embrace digitalization, innovation and technology in order to become a smarter business and Smart Port.
In 2020, FPH identified the opportunity to apply frontier Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to optimize our yard management activities at Flinders Adelaide Container Terminal (FACT). On an annual basis, over 400,000 twenty-foot-equivalent (TEU) containers transit through FACT and the efficiency and cost of handling containers into, and out from, the yard onto ship, truck or rail is critical to the productivity of the supply chain. There are a significant number of factors that influence how a container must be positioned in the yard and given the scale and complexity, it was identified that AI would be best positioned to optimize the movements and stacking of containers.
FPH partnered with Complexica, a leading provider of AI software applications for supply and demand optimization, to develop advanced software that will aim to deliver the following benefits:
- Reducing re-handling of containers (i.e. increased container moves per hour and more favorable ratio of productive / laden moves);
- Improving labor planning and utilization;
- Increasing port and terminal capacity; and
- Greater agility and resilience to respond to unexpected events.
FPH intends to increase its AI adoption to further expand the optimization across our operations and services, supporting the pursuit of efficient, productive and cost-effective port supply chains that benefit all users.