Ports of Auckland (POAL) has announced a new plan to reset and complete its automation project, after its pause due to an incident in June that revealed a potential safety risk.
As the safety risk has now been fixed, POAL is ready to restart with a revised project that will be implemented in four stages, with the first to start shortly.
Each stage has milestones based on safety, reliability, productivity, and operational readiness, that must be met before the project can progress to the next...
https://container-news.com/ports-of-auckland-restarts-its-automation-project/
I can tell you that our experience in the port of Rotterdam is that automation will reduce productivity per crane number of moves. Even the new built terminals of Rotterdam World Gateway and APMT Maasvlakte II cannot go to a higher rate than 23.3 moves per hour. They hope in the near future to make 28. but that’s it. APMT want to double now the terminal capacity and has to invest another Euro 500 million to make the automation more workable. Now these days with the megaships the automation is very time consuming . And only a few megaships are on time. Most of the time they are delayed. And with the existing terminal length and number of cranes it is impossible to operate 2 or 3 megaships at the same time. So the terminal operator has to invest again a lot of money and become more dependent of these shipping lines. These shipping lines will increase their bargaining power to terminal operators and at the end of the day only shipping lines will benefits.
Niek Stam
General Secretary of FNV Havens , Netherlands
http://www.fnvhavens.nl