Automation in freight port call process: real time data sharing to improve the stowage planning

Maritime transport involves many stakeholders, whose decisions and actions affect the whole logistic chain of containerized transport. In this context, ports play a crucial role and their operation performance determines the quality of containerized transport. Port call processes should be coordinated and optimized, not only during the planning phase, but also at operation level when carrying out and evaluating conducted port calls. As a matter of fact, nowadays the document exchange in maritime transport is definitely too fragmented. As a result, seaport activities are often uncoordinated. Such a lack of coordination in information exchange among all the involved actors usually provokes a significant waste of time, which may lead to a decrease of efficiency of maritime transport. Then, the challenge of designing and implementing an effective coordination in document and information exchange in maritime transport should be taken and won, as fostered by European Commission. In this connection, this study focuses on a specific phase of the port call process, namely the stowage planning, and present an approach to improve it.