Digital twin system for automated container terminal and a case study*

The ever-expanding scale and extensive business necessitate the comprehensive and lean management of terminal operations. As an effective bridge of cyber-physical fusion, digital twin (DT) provides revolutionary opportunities for intellectualized upgrades of terminals’ operation mode. However, the complexity of diverse port elements, inter-coupled business processes, and massive but isolated information, poses challenges to DT system construction for automated container terminals (ACTs). To address these issues, this work proposes a DT modeling approach based on business decomposition and object-oriented design. Then, an ACT-DT system architecture with high flexibility is proposed to orchestrate multi-source information in terminals. A case study of Qingdao port is finally presented for validation. The introduction of the ACT-DT system promotes cross-region, cross-business, and cross-source information sharing, and thus realizes the transparent management of full business processes in ACTs.