Port of Valencia tests 5G for ship docking operations

The head of Valenciaport has participated in the PORTWIN event ‘5G private and radars in the Port of Valencia: Pilot for assistance to the berthing of vessels’, a solution based on 5G technology to assist in real-time decision making and increase the safety of these operations.

The PORTWIN project, which is co-financed by the Agència Valenciana de la Innovació, combines cutting-edge technologies such as 5G, Edge Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Radar to digitise the ship docking operation by providing real-time assistance with highly accurate data on any ship approaching the Port of Valencia’s facilities.

The solution designed in PORTWIN, based on 5G smart radars, contributes to facilitate this berthing process, thanks to the real-time communication of the distance, speed and orientation of the vessels with respect to the berthing dock. This information is obtained through the use of radars, transmitted via 5G technology, processed in the Edge, and represented in an application that, thanks to its graphic interface, allows the position and distance of the vessel with respect to the dock to be visualised in real time from any device.

By using this application, masters, tugs, pilots and moorers can know the position of the ship with millimetric precision during the entire docking phase, thus enabling more efficient decision making that contributes to optimising operations and increasing efficiency and safety in this complex process.

At the event, the result of the implementation of a sensorisation layer of the infrastructure for the monitoring of the assistance process for the berthing of ships was presented at the Cruceros 1 pier of the north extension, which will help in real-time decision making and increase the safety of this operation, all based on 5G technology.

The project has been presented by the technology company Fivecomm, whose technological partners are Cellnex, A4Radar, Fundación Valenciaport and the PAV. In this case, Valenciaport has carried out a controlled transfer of the space in the Cruceros dock, the IT facilities at the quayside and has provided the pilot with electricity supply, with the help of the Digital Transformation department and the electricity service.