Opinion | When the Port Goes Dark, Automation Suddenly Looks Different

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

There is something impressive about watching a modern automated container terminal at work. Cranes move with precision. Driverless vehicles travel across the yard. Containers appear to flow from ship to shore with remarkably little human intervention.

But I keep coming back to one uncomfortable question.

What happens when the screen goes black?

Not when the terminal is quiet. Not during scheduled maintenance. I mean when a large container vessel is alongside, cranes are working, trucks are arriving at the gate and thousands of container movements are being coordinated.

Then the Terminal Operating System, or TOS, goes down.

Suddenly, automation does not look quite so impressive.

A modern TOS is effectively the brain of the terminal.

It knows which container has arrived. It knows where that container is stored. It knows which crane should move it, which vehicle should collect it and where it needs to go next.

The gate systems, yard equipment, cranes and automated guided vehicles all depend on information moving through the terminal.

That is precisely what makes automation so powerful.

It is also what makes me nervous.

The more connected a terminal becomes, the more important the availability and integrity of that information becomes.

Think about driving through an unfamiliar city using satellite navigation. Everything works perfectly until the screen disappears. The car still works. The steering wheel works. The engine works.

But where are you going?

That is essentially the problem an automated terminal can face.

A crane may still be perfectly capable of lifting a container. An AGV may be mechanically ready to drive across the terminal. But if the system cannot tell either machine which container to move and where to put it, physical capability becomes almost irrelevant.

There is something unfashionable about saying this in an age obsessed with automation, but people are remarkably adaptable.

In a conventional terminal, if one system fails, experienced operators can often improvise.

They pick up radios. They make telephone calls. They write things down. Supervisors coordinate movements manually. Operations may become slower and less efficient, but some level of activity can often continue.

Highly automated terminals are different.

Once several systems depend on the same digital information, losing that information can affect much more than the piece of software that originally failed.

That is the distinction terminal operators need to understand.

Equipment failure is not necessarily operational failure. Information failure can be.

If the crane does not know what to lift, the vehicle does not know where to drive and the operator cannot see where containers are located, the terminal has a much bigger problem than a broken computer.

And the consequences start accumulating quickly.

Vessels wait. Trucks queue. Containers miss connections. Yard congestion increases. Shipping schedules are disrupted. Demurrage and detention costs can follow.

Eventually, somebody has to pay.

There are already lessons available.

Ports of Auckland invested heavily in automating straddle carrier operations at the Fergusson Container Terminal. The automation programme ultimately ran into serious operational and software related problems and was abandoned in 2022.

One incident involved an automated straddle carrier striking a container stack, causing containers to topple.

COVID disruption complicated the wider situation, but the lesson should not simply be that automation failed.

The more important question is whether risk, testing, fallback capability and operational resilience received enough attention alongside the expected productivity gains.

That distinction matters.

Otherwise, the industry risks reaching the wrong conclusion.

Automation itself is not the problem. Automation without sufficient resilience is.

When companies buy automation technology, the conversation naturally revolves around productivity.

How many container moves per hour?

How much labour can be reduced?

How quickly can trucks pass through the gate?

What is the return on investment?

Those are perfectly reasonable questions.

But I would add several others.

What happens when it fails?

How quickly can the terminal recover?

Can individual sections continue operating independently?

Can operators still see where the cargo is?

Can critical operations switch to manual control?

Can transactions continue offline and be synchronised later?

And perhaps most importantly, has anybody actually tested these scenarios under realistic operating conditions?

Buying automation without properly answering those questions is a little like buying a ship because of its speed without asking what happens when the engine stops.

I believe this is where the conversation about port automation needs to change.

The objective should not be to build a terminal that never fails.

Every system eventually fails.

Hardware fails. Networks fail. Software contains bugs. Power supplies disappear. Communications are interrupted. People make mistakes. Cyber attacks happen.

The objective should therefore be to design a terminal that fails gracefully.

That means one problem should not automatically become everybody’s problem.

A modular TOS architecture can help by separating operational areas so that a failure affecting one function does not necessarily bring the entire terminal to a halt.

Offline capability matters for exactly the same reason.

If connectivity disappears, operators should still be able to perform essential functions, record movements and reconcile the information when systems return.

Products such as Infyz iTOMS demonstrate this type of approach through modular architecture and offline functionality. The specific supplier is less important than the principle.

Resilience needs to be designed into automation from the beginning.

It should not be something added after the first serious outage.

There is another uncomfortable part of this discussion.

The more connected terminals become, the larger their digital exposure becomes.

A cyber incident affecting a TOS is very different from somebody’s office computer becoming unavailable.

The software sits in the middle of physical cargo movements, equipment, gates and operational decisions.

Cybersecurity therefore cannot simply belong to the IT department.

It is an operational issue.

Authentication, access controls, network segregation, backup systems and recovery procedures need to be considered alongside crane productivity and yard utilisation.

More importantly, those recovery procedures need to be tested.

A beautifully written emergency plan sitting in a folder is not resilience.

Knowing that people can actually execute that plan at two o’clock in the morning with a vessel alongside is resilience.

None of this is an argument against port automation.

Quite the opposite.

Automation can improve productivity, safety, cargo visibility and terminal efficiency. As vessels become larger and supply chains demand greater predictability, ports will inevitably depend more heavily on digital systems.

But greater dependence should bring greater scrutiny.

The industry should stop measuring automation purely by what happens when everything works.

That is the easy part.

The real test comes when something does not.

If a TOS goes dark, can the terminal still function?

If the answer is no, management should understand exactly how quickly operations can be restored and what safeguards exist while that happens.

Because the most advanced terminal is not necessarily the one with the fewest people or the most automated machines.

It is the terminal that knows what to do when the technology stops working.

And perhaps that should become part of every automation business case.

Not simply: What will this technology save us when it works?

But also: What will it cost us when it doesn’t?