An IT-architecture to support energy efficiency and the usage of flexible loads at a container terminal

Abstract

This paper presents a component-based software architecture that enables a container terminal to optimize their energy demand and the flexibility of this demand. This flexibility is gained from using energy-intensive battery-powered Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) for container transport within the terminal. While Demand Response strategies are known and already applied in some industrial branches, it is not yet common in the logistics domain due to highly dynamical and time-critical processes. In order to forecast the energy demand for the terminal and to be able to optimize it while having constantly changing logistic processes, the architecture includes modules to process a simulation based forecast of the power demand, optimize the demand by changing battery charging plans and to control the execution of the optimizations.