A number of commercial vessels have already been unloaded
The Rotterdam World Gateway (RWG) automated container terminal at Maasvlakte 2 has been operating since the beginning of this year (2015) and is intended to be fully operational from 2016 onwards.
That was the claim made by RWG in an interview with a national newspaper regarding the commissioning of the 108 hectare complex in which 700 million euros have been invested. The first vessel, with around 150 to 200 moves, has now been processed.
The first larger (deep-sea) ships (+/- 13,000 teu) are expected in April or May. It is not yet known which shipping company will be involved. LRWG assumes that the terminal will impose new standards in the field of productivity. There is not only a new generation of the transshipment equipment, such as quayside cranes and agvs (automated guided vehicles), but also the operating systems of the American company Navis and TBA from Delft.
Approximately 200 permanent staff are going to be employed at the terminal. All port-related work, such as securing and releasing containers, is to be subcontracted to specialist companies. These will employ approximately 150 people. According to RWG the terminal, which has an annual capacity of 2.35 million teu, can be operated by between fifteen and twenty people.
The approximately 40 remote process operators, who will replace the traditional crane operators, play a key role. Although each of them will operate a single crane during the initial phase, in the end a single operator will have to be able to operate several cranes at once. Containers are removed from ships manually, but the rest of the process is fully automatic.
RWG decided not to make any announcement until the physical construction was ready so that they actually had something important to say. Project director Frank Keizer and his project team have created a magnificent terminal and the project team, which was responsible for the construction, has been gradually integrated into the operational organisation, although it still plays an active role in the background.
The terminal has now been set up as a mini terminal which RWG has been testing since October 2013. In the meantime major suppliers such as ZPMC and Terex Gottwald have delivered more and more modules which first also have to be tested before they can be used. After that RWG will incorporate the mini terminal. The same applies to the Navis/TBA terminal operating system.
As is the case with the cranes and the agvs the new terminal operating system is a completely new generation system. While the 2.0 series is still being used in the rest of the world RWG is going to start using the 3.0 series, which is truly a next level system. This software is being developed not only for RWG, but also for a number of other terminals, for example in Long Beach. The new system will absolutely speed up the transshipment process, primarily thanks to improved communication between the equipment. This will make the RWG terminal the envy of the rest of the world.
The entire area will be free of people. Soon RWG will only have a single manned reach stacker and five terminal trucks which will be used for, among other things, project cargo work. Otherwise everything will be fully automated environment which no one will be able, or allowed, to access. Crane data will soon be read remotely using laptops. The Battery Exchange Station, where the agvs can exchange their batteries in a fully automated process, will not require any human intervention.
In addition to that there will no longer be any crane operators, but remote process operators instead. Eventually between 35 and 40 people will be needed and they will work in shifts.