The First Dynamic Simulation Port of Digital Twin In China Unveiled! Jointly Created by China Merchants Group and 51WORLD
The successful hoisting of the first container at the third berth in the final acceptance and its stable landing on the smart trailer mark the significant achievements for the construction of Mawan Port. It has been upgraded from a traditional dock to a smart port and pay tribute to the 40th anniversary of the establishment of Shenzhen Special Economic Zone.
Mawan Smart Port is the first and even the world’s leading smart port in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area in the western port area of Shenzhen, and a starting point for a world-class port.
In this smart upgrade of Mawan Port, 51WORLD cooperates closely with CMHIT, a subsidiary of China Merchants Group, to jointly build a new operation simulation platform of digital twin port and achieve the “first” in three aspects:
First real-time drive of the port industry by dynamic data in all-element scenes of digital twin;
First full-cycle operation simulation coverage from cargo arrival, loading and unloading, transloading, storage and departure;
First situational awareness of the full volume of industrial equipment in the port under 5G environment;
Thus greatly improving the logistics and operation efficiency of Mawan Port.
01. Generation of static scenes
Through the AES all-element scene platform, we cloned nearly 1 million square meters of Mawan Port Area, accurately restored its topography and environmental features. We also created a 1:1 digital twin for over 100,000 containers.
02. Dynamic simulation
In combination of IoT, space-time data and following the physical properties and operation law, we empowered the real-time space-time posture movement for each port element — such as trailers, quay cranes, tower cranes and vessels, and brought the port “to life”.
03. Business connections
In terms of business connections, we opened a large number of API interfaces to enable the port management units to access various types of business data for big data processing and visualization, and improve the scalability and reusability of the entire digital twin platform.
With vivid port scenes, dynamic port elements and deployed business applications, Mawan Port has completed a true digital twin upgrade.
Dynamic generation and synchronization
Super large-scale container twin
Established on September 30, 1986, before the transformation, Mawan Port was a traditional bulk cargo terminal that boosted the urban construction of Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and made positive contributions to the prosperity and development of Shenzhen by transporting steel, cement, sand and gravel and other infrastructure materials. In the new era, Mawan Port is urgently in need of a smart upgrading.
It is the core work of the port terminal to efficiently allocate, stack, load and unload containers from various countries that come from far away. After the transformation, Mawan Smart Port covers an area of 983,600 square meters, with a total berth shoreline length of 1,930 meters and a total of 5 berths with an annual design capacity of 3 million TEUs, which can berth the world’s largest container liners.
51WORLD cooperates with CMHIT with the digital twin technology for dynamic generation and synchronization of over 100,000 containers in Mawan Port on a super-large scale, thus providing a simulation foundation to guarantee the port throughput efficiency.
The digital twin platform provides perfect API interfaces, which can access all kinds of container information in the port, including attribute data such as container owner, container type, container type and container numbering as well as container location. The port management authority only needs to input the attribute and location data according to the demand, then they can generate the container that meets the attribute by at the specified location in the dynamic rendering scene of digital twin. At the same time, the container logo, color and owner information can also be rendered and the container numbering can be printed to visually display the container information.
In this way, each container has both an “ID card” belonging to itself and a digital twin that is identical to the real world from inside to outside.
In the future, by clicking directly from the digital twin scene, managers can know all the information commonly used for the container, thus getting rid of the tedious work of reading forms and searching in the system.
Real-time data drive
Millisecond-level scheduling restoration of port operations
In order to bring the digital twin port to life, it is necessary to drive the digital twin scenes with real data. The platform provides standardized API interfaces for the three major types of port machinery and equipment: quay cranes, gantry cranes and trailers, and includes the function of setting different motion parameters to realize the two-way communication synchronization between real and virtual equipment.
For example, each quay crane in the scene can be clicked and selected, and the equipment operation interface contains parameter settings such as large forklift position, little forklift position, spreader position, and big arm angle, etc. With these real-time incoming continuous data, the quay crane equipment in the 3D scene can respond to the operation process in a real time manner, and achieve the millisecond-level dynamic restoration of the real action.
Besides the real data, the platform can also support the incoming simulation movement data to visually simulate the operation process and evaluate the feasibility of port operation plan.
For the simulation of container yard plan, the platform can make full use of the limited yard area for reasonable division of the stack yard and pre-configure the ideal location for each container according to the present and future container information, improve the yard utilization rate, and thus enhancing the port throughput and profitability.
In the digital twin scene, each equipment has a different preset operation perspective, from which users can view the equipment operation in real time in the digital twin world.
Trailers are the key part for the efficiency of container flow in the port. The digital twin scene can display the planned instruction trajectory and the actual operation trajectory of the trailers being executed from different perspectives, assist the management to check whether there are deviations and promptly warn of the trailers driving in violation.
It is noteworthy that the digital twin scene provides an equipment search tool that allows users to enter the equipment numbering for fuzzy search, so that users can find and locate equipment immediately, screen and filter all containers according to different conditions and accelerate the container retrieval process.
The digital twin platform provides different practical values for various types of management and operators at Mawan Port: dispatchers exercise the global field control through the platform; operators observe the equipment execution results in a real time manner with timely feedback; container operators save time and effort with one-click inventory check; security personnel monitor the real-time abnormal status to guarantee the safe production; operation and maintenance personnel control the equipment maintenance status and extend the service life of equipment.
All types of professionals can complete the synchronization of production scheduling information only through the digital twin scene, so as to significantly improve their work efficiency. The rich API interface settings also enable the port management authority to introduce more business data, carry out the application development on their own in the future, and enhance the application flexibility of the digital twin scene.
Digital twin+
Build Mawan Port to be a world-class port
Apart from the digital twin technology, Mawan Smart Port also integrates the new generation technologies such as artificial intelligence, 5G, BeiDou satellite navigation and autonomous driving. On the digital twin platform of 51WORLD, it is possible to achieve the synchronous perception of the physical world and synchronous update of physical operation rules and physical attributes, truly reflect the high speed rate and low latency, large-scale machine communication and enhanced mobile broadband capabilities of 5G, and bring into play the powerful positioning and navigation capabilities of the BeiDou system, while enabling the access of the subsequent unmanned fleet management and dispatching and command functions of the port.
After the gorgeous transformation, “Mawan Smart Port” will become the global port operation center of China Merchants Group. At this starting point, the western port area of Shenzhen will be built into the first and even the world’s leading smart port and world-class port in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.
