Summary
The Port Authority of the Bay of Algeciras (APBA) announced the third edition of the Innovation Journey Ideas Contest, with the aim of continuing to promote, foster and encourage innovative activity in the Port of Algeciras Bay (hereinafter, PBA).
In the same way as in the second edition, in this call the APBA intended that, in addition to employees and direct collaborators, all those agents of the innovative ecosystem of the Port Community who so wished (companies, university students, entrepreneurs, start-ups and individuals) could join the initiative with innovative proposals that respond to the challenge posed, in order to improve the competitiveness of the PBA and create value for its users and customers.
Innovative ideas alignment
The scope of application of the innovation ideas or proposals must be related to the port-logistic and maritime activity that takes place in the Port of Algeciras Bay and be aligned with the following innovation challenge: DATA-DRIVEN INNOVATION.
Participation and ideas assessment
During the 3 months that the competition was open, a total of 14 ideas were received from 18 different proposers and 5 collaborating companies and/or start-ups. Of these, of which 8 were group proposals, 12 passed all the phases of the evaluation process, based on the stage-gate idea management methodology, which assessed, among other characteristics, the strategic fit of the ideas, the expected impact at a socio-economic level, the technical feasibility of the solution and the degree of novelty.
Shortlisted proposals
Finally, after the assessment of the total proposals, the 6 short-listed ones were:
- Internal flow model of the Port of Algeciras Bay (Andrés García and Carlos A. Sánchez, APBA), in which a transport model is proposed for the analysis of traffic flows in the Port, allowing the service levels of the different roads to be analysed and new allocations to be studied, both when traffic is modified and when new roads are introduced.
- Optimisation of the operations and resources of the Border Control Post (María Román and Eva Frutos, APBA), based on the development of a predictive tool which, on the basis of the inspection requests received at the PCF management entity and with the available stopover information, provides a forecast of container and lorry arrivals at the PCF for inspection.
- Modelling of passenger flow at the Maritime Station (Carlos A. Sánchez, APBA), an idea aimed at developing a prediction model of passenger flow through the different halls and processes, which allows for capacity studies to be carried out, both static and dynamic, with the aim of knowing the levels of service (LoS) and being able to make the spaces more flexible so that they are capable of absorbing the demand, avoiding long queues and thus improving the quality perceived by the terminal’s users.
- Prediction of lorry queues in the port area (AddOcean), the objective of which is to obtain a short-term prediction of the volumes of arrivals of vehicles in the port, based mainly on the information of the loading lists of the planned stopovers and taking into account characteristic patterns of advance arrival at the start of the loading operation, as well as the real-time information of the stopovers.
- Ziday – Intelligent solution for the early detection of hydrocarbon spills (Hiades), focused on developing a platform to identify and quantify pollution episodes through expert analysis of satellite images using Artificial Intelligence techniques.
- Agility and optimisation of resources (AOR) (Sopra Steria), which proposes the development of a prescriptive tool for the optimisation of the port’s technical-nautical resources, through the use of Big Data, Machine Learning and Business Intelligence technologies and historical information on port calls, vessel characteristics and environmental status.
The 3 award-winners
- Prize for the best idea, proposed by an APBA employee: “Optimisation of the operations and resources of the Border Control Post” (María Román and Eva Frutos, APBA).
- Prize for the best idea, proposed by an agent external to the APBA: “Ziday – Intelligent solution for the early detection of hydrocarbon spills (Hiades)”.
- Prize for the idea with the greatest popular support through the APBA ideas portal voting system: “Agility and optimisation of resources (AOR)” (Sopra Steria).
