Available operational data in ports are constantly increasing and technology is getting inexpensive and widely available. However, an effective integration of operational data is far from optimal in most ports, and especially so in medium or small ports, where budget is limited and IT services usually is outsourced. PIXEL enables a two-way collaboration of ports, multimodal transport agents and cities for optimal use of internal and external resources, sustainable economic growth and environmental impact mitigation, towards the Port of the Future. PIXEL has leveraged technological enablers to voluntary exchange data among ports and stakeholders.
PIXEL objectives have been:
O1: Enable the IoT-based connection of port resources, transport agents and city sensor networks
O2: Achieve an automatic aggregation, homogenization and semantic annotation of multi-source heterogeneous data from internal and external actors
O3: Develop an operational management dashboard to enable a quicker, more accurate and in-depth knowledge of port operations
O4: Model and simulate port-operations processes for automated optimization
O5: Develop predictive algorithms
O6: Develop a methodology for quantifying, validating, interpreting and integrating all environmental impacts of port activities into a single metric called PEI
O7: Develop guidelines for mitigating possible environmental and health effects of port activities
Regarding its importance for society, the impacts of the project are noticeable from both the environmental and operational perspective.
As a conclusion, PIXEL has reached its committed objectives, delivering a combination of technology and methodology that has resulted in four products: BDE, MDA, PAS and PEI that have covered the analysed requirements. An IoT-powered platform has been devised, implemented and deployed in the four ports of the project. In addition, a variety of models and predictive algorithms have been applied.