Kris Kosmala writes for Splash today on a topic he’s regularly asked about. Introducing robotics in container terminals gives rise to emotions, questions, and sometime violent resistance from employees fearing either reduction in their work or a complete loss of employment. Though in reality, automation will progress and it will greatly affect how we operate modern container terminals. Historically, ports went hand in hand with the commercial and manufacturing activity of human settlements. Over time, the land in those settlements became scarce and more dense, pushing the factories farther and farther away from the shore and preventing the ports from expanding to accommodate more and more goods being traded between the settlements. Managing the smooth flow of goods in that limited space has led to plenty of innovations. First and foremost, we started shipping goods in reasonably standardised boxes. This changed the nature of the piers serving the vessels, the equipment lifting the boxes, and the techniques to stow those boxes into the holds of the vessels. Containers are not smoothly entering and leaving the container terminals at the same time. So, we also learned to stack the boxes higher and in denser stacks than ever before. The tight space in these temporary storage yards has led to evolution of the container stacking equipment and new techniques for managing the yards. More goods being traded translate into more vessels calling the terminals more frequently and more boxes being exchanged between the terminal and the vessel during every terminal call. The speed of the exchange of the boxes between the terminal and the vessels, as well as between the terminal and the hinterland had to increase, but there are limits to how fast we can transport each container both horizontally and vertically at each stage of the vessel-land exchange. This production line still consists of the same distinct zones – the berth at which the ship is loaded/unloaded, the area between the berth and the container stacks, the stacks in the yard, the area between the stacks and the external gates of the terminal, the gates through which the containers enter and leave the yard, and the terminal access area external to the terminal. This mini-chain of zones must function smoothly and at the same speed to avoid creation of bottlenecks. When we automate a factory production line consisting of multiple machines sequentially processing one unit of some product, we carefully analyse the optimal time needed for that product to be handed off between any two machines. The analysis results in definition of the takt time, the amount of time that must elapse between two consecutive unit completions in order to meet the demand. Translating this into the container terminal speak, the optimal takt results in no loss of time due to handling of the box in each distinct zone and handoffs of the box between adjacent zones. In case of the terminal, the demand is the number of required (by contract) moves of the container between the land and the vessel expressed in berth moves per hour (BMPH) or vessel moves per hour (VMPH). That measure then drives the speed of the machines operating in each of those distinct zones through which the container travels. In automated terminals, we use mathematics to synchronise the rate at which the machines perform the handling and the handoffs. We can tune this rate ad infinitum to meet the desired demand. In semi-automated and in manual terminals