Port Automation: Sequencing Technology Without Stopping the Terminal

Port Economics, Management and Policy reports that 76 container terminals worldwide had a form of operational automation as of 2025. Given about 850 container terminals of relevant size and function, that represents 9.0% of all main container terminals but 14.7% of the total global footprint in hectares. A separate count from the same source puts automated terminals at 77, covering more than 5,670 hectares, still less than 10% of all main terminals.

The size pattern is revealing (Exhibit 1). The average container terminal is 51.7 hectares; automated terminals average 74.7. Semi-automated terminals, of which 50 are reported, average 61.1 hectares, while fully automated terminals average 99.7 and completely automated ones 92.0. Automation is concentrated where scale justifies the fixed cost of the systems, the integration effort and the redesign of layout.

This has two consequences for a CIO or CTO in Southeast Asia. First, the evidence base for full automation comes mainly from large, often greenfield, sites, and may not transfer to a mid-sized brownfield terminal with mixed traffic. Second, the most common form is semi-automation, which indicates that many operators have judged a partial approach to be the practical route.

We should be careful about what the data do not show. There is no consistent public benchmark of productivity, cost or safety outcomes across automated and conventional terminals, and published claims often come from vendors or operators. Boards should ask for evidence on comparable terminals and should expect ranges, not single figures.

Operators should also be wary of the symmetry between size and automation. Large terminals can spread the fixed cost of automation across more volume, while smaller ones face a heavier burden per container. For a mid-sized Southeast Asian terminal, the right ambition may be to automate the processes that matter most and to leave the rest manual, with a clear view of the cost per move at each stage.

For Southeast Asia the lesson is that archetypes matter more than averages. The region contains large hubs and a long tail of regional and feeder terminals, and the sensible automation path for each differs. A hub may justify remote quay operation and automated stacking; a feeder terminal may be best served by a gate and appointment upgrade and a selective set of electrified yard machines.

What to do: classify your current terminals by scale, layout and traffic mix, and identify which automation archetype is a realistic reference: a greenfield flagship, a large brownfield conversion or a semi-automated yard. Base your business case on that comparator.

Container flows are growing. Drewry reports that global container port throughput reached 994 million TEU in 2025, up 6.5% from the previous year, after rising 7.2% to 928 million TEU in 2024 in its previous annual review. Capital investment by the operators it surveyed rose 23% in 2025, and operators are expected to add about 186 million TEU of capacity to their portfolios from 2025 to 2030. UNCTAD’s measure of world containerised trade shows the same recovery (Exhibit 2): 170.5 million TEU in 2024, up from 159.2 million in 2023.

Southeast Asia sits at the centre of that growth. Singapore recorded 44.66 million TEU of container throughput in 2025, according to the Maritime and Port Authority, and regional hubs continue to expand. Hutchison Ports’ fully remote-controlled Terminal D at Laem Chabang in Thailand was reported to add 3.5 million TEU of capacity for $600 million, and the Port of Tanjung Pelepas ordered 48 electric rubber-tyred gantry cranes to add to 35 ordered earlier, for a terminal with a capacity of 13 million TEU.

The operating implication is that no terminal can take a long outage in order to modernise. Ship schedules, hinterland contracts and carrier commitments constrain downtime. A transformation plan that depends on closing a berth for months is, in most cases, not a plan at all. Phasing is the strategy.

Competition adds pressure. Global terminal operators are growing partly through carrier-linked investment: Drewry reports that CMA CGM’s equity-adjusted volumes have grown 55% since 2019 and MSC’s by 47%. Independent and state-linked operators in Southeast Asia face carriers with ports of their own and with the capacity to move volume if service deteriorates.

Finance and technology leaders need a shared language for the business case. We suggest building it on cost per move, vessel and truck turn times, equipment availability and safety, each with a range and an assumption log. A case built on a single optimistic number invites disappointment; one built on ranges and named assumptions lets the board see what must be true for the investment to pay back.

What to do: build the automation programme around the capacity plan. For each phase, state the berth, yard block or gate lane affected, the maximum permitted loss of throughput, and the recovery plan if a go-live does not stabilise.

The World Bank’s Container Port Performance Index (CPPI) offers a useful corrective. In the 2023 edition, which ranks 405 container ports on the duration of port stay for container vessels using more than 182,000 vessel calls, East and Southeast Asian ports accounted for 13 of the top 20 places. In the preceding edition, covering 2022 and 348 ports, Malaysia’s Tanjung Pelepas ranked 6th, Vietnam’s Cai Mep 12th and Singapore 18th.

The CPPI measures time in port, not automation, and several of the leaders are conventional or semi-automated. That is a reminder that vessel time depends on berth planning, pilotage, tug availability, yard discipline and information sharing, many of which can be improved without a single automated crane. The same index noted that Dar es Salaam Port in Tanzania managed to shave ship arrival times by 57%, a result of operational change and not of capital-heavy automation.

For a CIO, the finding is that the first source of improvement is often digital coordination: sharing berth windows, expected arrival times and yard plans with shipping lines, truckers and customs in a consistent way. Those improvements are cheaper and faster than hardware automation, and they create the data on which later automation depends.

Do not read this as an argument against automation. It is an argument for being clear about the problem to be solved. If the constraint is gate congestion, yard automation or a truck appointment system is the answer. If it is berth productivity, quay-side changes may be warranted. If it is vessel waiting time, the solution may lie in planning.

The wider environment matters. Many Southeast Asian ports sit in hubs that serve transhipment and gateway traffic, and customers can change routing within a quarter. Service reliability, not peak productivity, is often what carriers value. Automation programmes should therefore be judged on predictability: how consistently the terminal meets its promised windows, not only on its best-case speed.

A related point concerns data sharing with shipping lines. Many vessel delays originate in information gaps: late berth confirmations, changing arrival estimates and unclear stowage updates. Investing in standard message formats and in portal access for carriers and hauliers can shorten time in port at a fraction of the cost of new equipment, and it prepares the ground for automation.

What to do: diagnose the constraint using CPPI-style metrics on your own terminal (ship time in port, berth productivity, truck turn time, dwell) before choosing the technology. Let the largest controllable delay determine the first investment.

The yard and gate are where a terminal’s performance is shaped between the quay and the customer. Container stacking, equipment dispatch and truck arrivals are determined here, and they can be automated in blocks. Electrified or remotely supervised yard cranes can be introduced in one stack at a time, with the rest of the yard continuing to operate. Gate optical character recognition, appointment systems and automated lane management can be added without touching the quay.

Regional examples point in the same direction. The Port of Tanjung Pelepas has been adding electric rubber-tyred gantry cranes, with 48 on order on top of 35 earlier, and Hutchison’s Laem Chabang Terminal D uses remotely controlled gantry cranes. These are yard-side decisions that deliver capacity and operational control without requiring a conventional terminal to stop. We do not suggest that these projects are a template; we note that they reflect incremental choices by large operators.

The semi-automated model supports the argument. PEMP’s count of 50 semi-automated facilities, against a smaller number of fully automated ones, shows that most operators with automation have chosen a bounded approach. Semi-automated terminals also average 61.1 hectares, a more attainable scale for many Southeast Asian terminals than the 99.7 hectares of fully automated sites.

The yard also produces the data on which the rest depends: container location, equipment status, dwell time and truck sequence. A well-instrumented yard supplies the digital twin with credible inputs, and it gives the terminal operating system the information it needs to plan quay moves accurately.

Because the evidence base is imperfect, we encourage operators to build their own. That means instrumenting the terminal before change, recording baselines for the metrics above, and keeping a log of what was changed and when. The same data later supports regulatory reporting, customer service-level discussions and the investment case for the next phase.

Equipment choices in the yard should keep options open. Electrified machines that can later be fitted for remote or automated operation offer a stepping stone, while locking into a proprietary architecture early can limit later choices. Ask vendors for open interfaces and for clarity on how their equipment will connect to a terminal operating system from another supplier.

What to do: define the first phase as a yard block and a gate lane, with a measurable target such as truck turn time, moves per equipment hour or yard-density utilisation, and a rollback plan that allows manual operation for the affected block.

Quay cranes are the most visible assets, and the pressure to automate them is strong. They are also where an error costs the most: a delayed vessel, an idle berth, an unhappy carrier. The consequences of poor data are greatest here. A remotely operated quay crane relies on accurate container identification, stowage plans, yard readiness and equipment status. If any of these is unreliable, the crane waits.

For that reason we advise sequencing quay automation behind three foundations. The first is a terminal operating system that can plan and sequence moves across the quay, yard and gate in near real time and that has been tested with automated equipment. The second is clean master data on containers, equipment, customers and vessels. The third is a tested interface with the shipping lines’ stowage and berth-planning systems.

A digital twin belongs inside this logic. A twin is useful when it is fed by the same real-time data that the terminal operating system uses, and when it is used to test changes before they are made on the live terminal: a new yard layout, a revised dispatch rule, a different crane schedule. A twin built before the data is reliable will produce impressive models and poor decisions.

When the foundations are in place, quay automation can be introduced in stages: remote operation of a limited number of cranes on one berth, then extension. The Laem Chabang example illustrates remote-controlled quay and gantry cranes, reported for a new terminal. Retrofit at a working berth is harder, and we suggest piloting on a berth with lower service-level exposure.

Choosing the right integrator is as important as choosing equipment. The best equipment, poorly integrated, produces an unreliable terminal. Ask integrators for references on projects of similar scale and complexity, require a staged acceptance process with clear test criteria, and ensure that your own team learns enough to run the system without permanent dependence on the vendor.

What to do: set explicit readiness gates before quay automation proceeds: data accuracy thresholds, a successful end-to-end test of the terminal operating system with automated equipment, and agreed operating procedures for degraded modes.

Automation and digital twins increase the number of connected systems, and with it the attack surface. A survey of US ports and terminals executives, reported by SC Media citing SecurityWeek and Jones Walker, found that more than 90% were very confident about their organisations’ overall cybersecurity posture, while 55% said breach attempts had been detected in their environment and 45% reported experiencing breaches in the past 12 months. The survey is American and not specific to Southeast Asia, but the pattern is instructive (Exhibit 3).

The same survey reported that 36% of respondents said data breaches involved supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, cited as the leading cybersecurity vulnerability in the sector. SCADA and operational technology sit at the heart of automated equipment, so the exposure is directly relevant to any automation programme. The gap between stated confidence and reported incidents suggests that many organisations are less prepared than they believe.

For a CIO, the implication is to treat cybersecurity as a design requirement of each automation phase and not as a final test. Network segmentation between information technology and operational technology, secure remote access for vendors, tested incident response that includes manual fallback, and supplier security terms in contracts should be specified before equipment is ordered.

There is also a dependency risk. Automated terminals rely on a small number of equipment and software vendors, often with remote support. The contract should set out update procedures, access controls, audit rights and the operator’s ability to run the terminal in a degraded mode if a vendor connection is cut.

Resilience should be part of every design review. A highly automated terminal depends on power, networks and software in ways that a manual terminal does not. Backup power, redundant connectivity, tested restart procedures and manual operating modes for each automated block are inexpensive relative to the cost of an unplanned stoppage, and they reassure carriers and regulators.

Governance of operational technology should sit with a named senior executive, since responsibility often falls between information technology, engineering and operations. Regular joint exercises across those teams, including simulated loss of a control system, expose gaps long before a real incident does, and give the board evidence that the controls work.

What to do: commission an independent assessment of operational technology security before the first automation phase, and make the results a gate for subsequent phases. Practise a manual fallback exercise on a live yard block at least annually.

Putting these arguments together gives a five-phase sequence, summarised in Exhibit 4 and Exhibit 5. Phase one builds the data and coordination foundations: a modern terminal operating system, master data clean-up, truck appointments and berth-information sharing. Phase two automates or semi-automates the gate and one yard block. Phase three extends the yard and introduces a digital twin for planning and testing. Phase four pilots remote or automated operation at the quay on one berth. Phase five scales.

Each phase should be judged against a small set of measures: throughput and moves per hour, vessel and truck turn times, equipment availability, safety incidents, cyber incidents and cost per move. Targets should be set before work begins and reported to the board, so that decisions to proceed rest on results, not on the programme schedule.

Funding should follow the same logic. Operators are investing heavily; Drewry reports a 23% rise in capital investment among surveyed operators in 2025. Capital allocated to later phases should be released against evidence from earlier ones. This discipline protects the operator from sunk-cost pressure and keeps vendor negotiations credible.

People are central. Automation changes the work of crane operators, yard planners and maintenance teams, and the move from manual to remote and supervisory roles takes time. A reskilling plan, with transparent communication to employees and, where relevant, unions, is a condition of keeping the terminal running, not a soft add-on.

Finally, governance. A programme that spans several years will outlast individual managers, so decisions, assumptions and phase-gate criteria should be recorded and reviewed by a steering group that includes operations, technology, finance, safety and security. When results diverge from the plan, that group can decide quickly whether to adjust, pause or continue, which is the practical meaning of keeping the terminal running.

What to do: agree the phase gates and measures with the board, appoint a single accountable executive for the programme, and publish a one-page integrated plan that shows the capacity impact of each phase on the terminal’s operating calendar.

Karter McKinley supports port operators through its AI & Technology implementation service. We help diagnose the binding constraint, define the phased roadmap and readiness gates, structure vendor and integration selection, and design the programme governance. We do not claim to have operated a terminal.