Page 8 - Port Of Hamburg Magazine 01.2018

der Deutschen räsentiert über itgliedschaften rungsindustrie.
■ 50 YEARS OF CONTAINERS IN HAMBURG
Large ef ciency gains can still be realised in the interface between ship and port, and port and land transport
08 | Port of Hamburg Magazine | March 2018
container ships require larger container terminals, but there are limits to how large container terminals can become, as most ports are located close to cities, for the obvious reason that this where often most of the consumption and production takes place. Yet space is scarce in cities. Too many port-cities are unfortunately confronted these days with congested ports. A lot of these bottlenecks exist in a way because the standard container is still the undisputed norm.
So the question is: Would it be possible to conceive of an additional layer of standardisation, a unit that encompass- es a multitude of individual containers? This is the idea behind the revolutionary idea of the Venice offshore port.
In this concept, the offshore port does not handle each in- dividual container with conventional container cranes, but facilitates the disaggregation of a mother vessel into barg- es (called cassettes) that each contain 384 containers. This allows the handling time of the offshore port to be very short.
A similar question on an additional layer of standardisa- tion could be asked at a lower aggregation level: Is it pos- sible to find a level of modularity between the container and the individual parcel that is in the container? So, some sort of a set of sub-container developed in concepts such as the “physical internet” that could improve the efficien- cy of freight transport.