Portuguese Pilot - Monitoring capabilities for environmental quality and safety levels in ports
- Sustainability Aspects: Monitoring capabilities for environmental quality and safety levels
in ports. - Targeted Vertical: Environmental monitoring & safety
- Partners:
- Instituto Pedro Nunes: Use Case leader, Developer and Integrator
- Instituto de Telecomunicacoes/Altice Labs SA: Testbed providers
- Altice Labs SA: Telecom operator
- Instituto Pedro Nunes /One Source /JSIO: Developers Integrators
- Administração do Porto de Aveiro, S.A: End user
The Portuguese Use Case aims to improve monitoring capabilities for environmental quality and safety levels in ports by leveraging B5G/6G-related sensing, communication, and intelligence technologies. The use case will be realised in Aveiro and Ilhavo and seeks to address sustainable development goals (SDG) targets and upcoming environmental regulations, exploring 6G potential to enable innovative environmental and safety awareness.
Motivation and challenges:
Regulations such as the Fit for 55 packages, focusing on directives like National Emission Reduction Commitments (NEC) and the Ambient Air Quality Directive (AAQD), water quality regulations, including Zero Pollution package proposals and revised Urban Wastewater Treatment (UWT) Directive, will all have significant impact in future Ports operation. Moreover, the logistics operations in ports have significant environmental impacts, especially during the last-mile transportation of goods. To address this, a system is proposed to enhance security, efficiency, and transparency within port operations. This system involves installing cameras at entry gates for truck identification and integrating 6G technologies to monitor hazardous material transportation. A proof of concept (PoC) will use strategically positioned cameras and video analytics to detect trucks carrying dangerous goods, providing real-time alerts for safety management. Additionally, the system will capture images of authorized truck movements to verify cargo condition and aid in insurance claims and liability determination.
Solutions/Trial scenarios to address the challenges
The system will utilize B5G connectivity to support its functionalities, ensuring high-speed, low- latency transmission of data from cameras to central processing units. RedCap-enabled capabilities enable efficient resource allocation, optimizing energy and network usage by initially using low-quality streams and low-performance clusters for basic truck detection. As trucks are detected, the system dynamically upgrades to higher quality streams and allocates additional resources as needed. Context-aware and dynamic activation of network slices ensures uninterrupted transmission of critical data, such as FHD/4K video and increased frequency IoT data collection, enhancing reliability and performance while minimizing inefficiencies associated with continuous streaming of top-quality video.
Figure 1: Portuguese sustainable and safe Port use case diagram.
The use case combines B5G/6G technology with other advancements to meet specific needs:
a) IoT sensors for monitoring air and water quality, noise levels, and energy consumption with small data transmission;
b) RedCap for energy- and data-efficient video surveillance, enabling enriched sensing and monitoring of incidents like illegal entry of vehicles carrying dangerous goods;
c) Knowledge Defined Networking, Green AI, and Orchestration for efficient management of multiple B5G/6G network slices tailored to support a port’s digital twin including real-time infrastructure monitoring and incident analysis.
The activities required for the successful implementation of the envisioned use case can be split according to the triplet of app components as presented in Table 1.
Table 1: 6G-VERSUS application components for Portuguese use case
| V-apps | (1) processing of data collected by water quality, air quality and movement sensors, power consumption or heterogeneous video cameras for verification of persons and vehicles presence, which collectively enable a reliable digital twin of the operational environment, contributing to incident prevention or detection and its overall safety; (2) provide presentation, reporting and dashboard capabilities to the campus managers, offering a real time view of the campus resources, alerting for any potential risks. |
|---|---|
| AI-apps | (1) the AI-app, in the shape of an advanced digital twin, will provide a detailed comprehension over the infrastructure / campus operational environment (e.g. incidents alerts), as well as optimize the infrastructure operation according to energy-driven objectives; (2) provide predictive and prescriptive data analytics to build a digital twin for the campus, towards a smart sustainable campus. |
| N-Apps | (1) reliable sensors-network communication while coordinating relevant actions, e.g. RedCap capabilities to control data transmission efficiency based on network parameters, such as temporarily degrading QoS; (2) activates high-quality video transmission from cameras upon truck detection, adjusting video settings when trucks are absent; (3) collects data from various sources, ingesting it to Live!Data management platform, to enhance the smart campus environmental capabilities. |
As sustainability is of vital importance in 6G-VERSUS, the main sustainability challenges are summarized together with the expected outcomes of this use case in Table 2.
Table 2: Main sustainability challenges and expected outcomes for Portuguese use case.
| Main Sustainability Challenges |
|---|
| 1) Environmental: a) Real-time monitoring of environmental parameters helping to identify and mitigate pollution sources; b) Electric power/energy management for various subsystems on the roads and buildings within the infrastructure; c) Renewable energy, automatic street lighting system with efficient power management; d) Tracking of EV/non-EV fleet, charging efficiency and usage monitoring. |
| 2) Economic: a) Cost savings and increased flow of goods, driven from optimized logistics and port operations; b) Avoid or minimize major damage to existing services via digital map of underground campus infrastructures (electrical/internet wiring, water pipes) for predictive maintenance and quick tracking of critical issues; c) Reduce monthly bills, via the monitoring of each point in the power grid and analysis of real-time load on the power system to detect potential failures. |
| 3) Societal: a) Reduction in the number of accidents and incidents within port facilities and surrounding road infratructures; b) decrease in response time to emergency situations through the implementation of advanced communication, sensor networks and incident detection systems; c) enhancement of overall public perception of safety and security in port regions, as measured by community surveys or sentiment analysis. |
| Expected Outcomes |
| 1) Heterogeneous IoT and 6G devices connected to a service data platform, enabling for port infrastructure up to last mile following capabilities: a) Real-time alerting, providing awareness to critical events or anomalous data; b) Uncovering patterns and relationships among the collected heterogeneous data; c) Predictive analytics, forecasting events or trends based on aggregated historical data; d) Prescriptive analytics, recommending specific actions for optimizing outcomes. |