United Nations’ Review of Maritime Trade estimates global trade volumes at 815.6 million TEU. For each container that composes this landscape, a whole supply chain is deployed in order to assure the arrival in due time and proper manner. Decisions are taken in each step of the process: where the container is stored at port, how is it moved towards the ship, where the container is stored in the vessel and more choices.
Each decision has an unscaled impact on the whole process: a butterfly effect that conforms a truly complex system. If a single container is stored unreasonably or presents an unexpected flaw, the unloading or loading of neighbouring containers becomes costly and inefficient.
What would happen if decisions could be properly optimized? What could occur if the decision of depositing a given container is not locally decided but globally analyzed? Both time and money, key to any business actor, are saved.
Nowadays, terminal operating systems like Navis and useful softwares such as CASP help planners from ports and liners to organize their services, but the planning is executed with a lot of restrictions, in a limited time, and optimizing using best practices.
Quantum-South is addressing this problem of container location both in terminals and in vessels. The two use cases being explored are a ship load optimization module (designed to allocate cargo optimally in a given ship as to minimize loading and unloading time) and a terminal optimization service (created to assign container slots in terminals and plan container movements and truck calls given a terminal’s nature).
Ship load optimization can contemplate all kind of stability constraints, future ports and incoming container considerations, torsion moments and OOG cargo as well as reefer. Terminal operation optimization is meant to, given a terminal’s layout, help movement and appointments within the terminal. The system can ponder the different cranes and trucks available and their nature, being straddle carriers, RTGs or RMGs.
Quantum computers can help to get a better way to plan for cargo allocation and dynamics, with the same restrictions, the same limited time, still using best practices. Working with complex optimization problems in cargo, with quantum computing software Quantum-South aims to achieve better results than current conventional systems and help companies in the maritime arena to improve revenues and reduce costs.
The optimization algorithm gets integrated into the legacy systems and, simultaneously, returns the optimal cargo allocation for time minimization. Quantum computers are well suited to address optimization problems, where complex equations can be dealt in a more efficient way than classical computers. At the moment, large technology companies are competing in a quantum race for bringing global access to this technology. Maritime cargo suits this innovation and cannot be left unnoticed.