University of São Paulo: Poli project seeks to increase productivity in port areas and help the environment

Port areas are extremely important for all sectors: from commerce to employability. Given this relevance, the Dynamic Monitoring of Ship Loading and Unloading in Real Time project for Productivity Gain and Particulate Reduction, supported by CNPq (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development), seeks to help solve problems involving ports .



“The idea was to bring factory techniques to the port, to the ship. We are always concerned with the efficiency of the systems, that is, how can we reduce waste, improve productivity, that is, produce more with less? This is the great motto of production engineering”, says professor Daniel Mota from the Department of Production Engineering at USP’s Polytechnic School (Poli) and project coordinator.



Process
The focus of the project is to gain efficiency in port activity and the methods used for this are technological and in the field of artificial intelligence. “We are going to monitor and film these ships and the data collected by the camera will be processed by neural networks and algorithms so that we can extract information about productivity from these ships”, explains the expert.

Mota adds: “A part of the project involves processing the image and the other part transmitting that image”. In order to improve and analyze the use of the projected tools, Poli has an agreement that allows the testing of the models in the largest port complex in Latin America, the Port of Santos.

environmental issue


Ships, during the loading and unloading process, can leave some particulates, that is, parts of what they are transporting, such as soy beans, corn, oil. This is detrimental to both transport efficiency and the receiving environment. “When we were piloting this algorithm, the conceptual model, that is, what we expect from this mathematical model, our director Rui Carlos Botter had an insight . He raised the issue of the camera that films the ships also being able to identify particulates. We went to consult academics to see if it was possible to collect this information and, to our surprise, this computer vision technology is super advanced. In this way, we aggregate the productivity gain and the reduction of particulates”, comments the professor.



“We ended up taking the project to that side where there are both productivity gains and treatment related to sustainability. Sustainability must be treated from the point of view of process improvement: with the process being better treated, it will bring sustainability gains, because it will be faster, will waste less fuel and will contaminate less the environment”, points out Mota. “The two things are not antagonistic things, they must be together, work synergistically”, he adds.



Progress
The project is still in its initial phase, with resources from CNPq still withheld. However, the specialist ensures that “human resources” are active: “We are working on a more conceptual part, but the teams are already working in Porto, analyzing the location. In terms of ‘human resources’ we are at full steam”.

Disclosure is also a fundamental and mandatory part of the project. There are still vacancies open for master’s and doctoral students, however, the undergraduate ones are already sold out. “Those who are interested in artificial intelligence, port and production engineering and think that these things don’t talk, I’m here to convince them of the opposite”, emphasizes the professor.