Integrated Terminal-Ship System

An innovative solution for the future?


Growing cargo volume places increasingly high demands on ports and their infrastructure. Many ports are reaching their capacity limits with regard to hinterland traffic.

Quay walls and stacking areas cannot be infinitely expanded and terminal productivity, too, is coming up against its maximum limits. More and more container vessels have to be cleared and thus more containers have to be moved while cargo handling capacity on the pier as well as the required storage space remain a bottleneck. The cargo handling capacity essentially depends on the number of gantry cranes in use and their moves.

However, operating an unlimited number of gantry cranes for faster loading and discharge is not possible without further ado since the horizontal movements, i.e. carrying away and delivering the containers from and to the terminal stacking areas, depend on the ship`s size and the number of hatches used for cargo operation. For this reason only four to five gantry cranes are assigned for loading and discharging operations on a large container vessel.

The so-called Integrated Terminal-Ship System (ITSS) was developed on the basis of this knowledge and considerations given to increasing the productivity at this bottleneck while at the same time accelerating direct transhipment of transit cargo that is transported to other ports as well as carrying out such work with greater cost efficiency.

This system refers to loading and discharging on both sides of the ship as well as direct handling of transit cargo between large container ships and the feeder vessels. Oncarriage via the sea by means of smaller feeder vessels is increasing. Today the share of transit cargo to be shipped is already high on some routes and will certainly rise.

In the port of Singapore, for example, the entire cargo of an arriving vessel is in most cases destined for oncarriage, with the exception of a few containers for the hinterland of Malaysia and Singapore itself. A similar situation can be observed in Shanghai as transit port for northern China as well as in Hong Kong for China and Taiwan. In Hamburg 35 % of the total cargo is currently carried on via feeder vessel. According to presentday project planning, the corresponding feeder cargo figure for the Jade-Weser-Port planned in Wilhelmshaven will even reach 60 %.

Feeding the Feeder

Cargo handling on both sides of a ship, as envisaged by ITSS, would have considerable rationalisation potential. According to calculations of its inventor, after all, eight to ten gantry cranes could combine cargo handling work on both sides of a vessel at the same time with transhipment of feeder cargo onto a ready to go feeder vessel alongside the deepsea carrier. This relieves a terminal of all otherwise required horizontal movements and costintensive container stacking. In other words: Double cargo handling from ship to quay and from quay to feeder vessels, belongs to the past.

To enable cargo handling on both sides of a vessel, the patented ITSS provides for construction of roughly 400 m long and at least 16 m wide finger pier next to the unchanged shore side of a terminal and at a parallel distance of approx. 65 m from each other so that larger container carriers can dock in between. Five high-performance gantry cranes that span across the entire terminal, including the ships, move back and forth on rails that are mounted on both the shore side and the finger pier. By means of two lifting devices, each crane can load and discharge on both sides at the same time.

In ports that handle exclusively or pre­dominantly feeder cargo, such as Malta or Algeciras, the ITSS terminal can also consist of two finger piers so that feeder vessels can moor on both sides. The little cargo volume destined for the local port is placed on pontoons. A pontoon system is also advantageous to ports in which fixed finger piers cannot be built.

The advantages of an ITSS operation include direct transhipment of feeder cargo that can concurrently be loaded and discharged. This relieves the terminal storage areas from the burden of feeder cargo and reduces cargo handling costs. The port lay times of container ships are shortened, furthermore portrelated expenses for feeder vessels can be reduced since the ships no longer use the shore pier.This poses great challenges onto stowage planners focussing on rapid cargo handling by coordinating the stowage plans of large container ships with those of feeder vessels. Furthermore a major prerequisite is a reliable schedule so as to guarantee the necessary simultaneous arrivals of all vessels involved. Critics of the system view this as the biggest problem.

Disadvantageous impacts of cargo handling on both sides may result from the mooring of feeder vessels alongside a floating pontoon. As in the case of the so-called Midstream Operation, damage to vessels cannot entirely be ruled out. Midstream Operation refers to a system common in Hong Kong in which a container vessel is loaded and discharged on the open sea and the oncarriage of cargo is effected via feeder vessels. Due to the swell, however, loading and discharging are subject to difficult conditions for both material and people.

For the specific situation of many ports ITSS could be a solution for the future as far as efficient handling of the high cargo volume is concerned, though it may take a while before it becomes feasible.

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