THE Batangas Container Terminal (BCT) operated by Asian Terminals Inc. (ATI) has successfully switched to fully automated gates, making it the first port in the country to adopt the system.

William Khoury, DP World Philippines CEO and ATI director said: “We are very pleased to implement another industry first through BCT as we continuously upgrade our capabilities to provide smarter, faster, and safer ports and logistics services to our customers anchored on gamechanging technologies. This early, the AGS has boosted BCT’s efficiency, increased gate capacity and improved stakeholder safety, which collectively contributes to a more robust logistics sector, especially at this time of postpandemic trade recovery.”

BCT leveraged the technologies of its foreign equity partner and global trade enabler DP World. The AI-powered Cargoes AVA+ automated gate system (AGS), developed by DP World Zodiac FZE, went live in BCT recently. It has paved the way for smarter, faster and safer trade through Southern Luzon’s international gateway port.

“This also marked another milestone for BCT as it officially became the first port in the Philippines to transition to an AGS backed by machine learning and the foremost site across DP World’s global terminal network to fully implement the system,” ATI said.

BCT previously operated three lanes manually, with an individual operator needed at each gate. But, with the new system, all three lanes are now supervised remotely through the customized Gate Operating System, making the ingress and egress of trucks contactless and operationally safer.

Cargoes AVA+ AGS delivers integrated solutions for gate process automation, encompassing cameras, kiosks and gate operating systems. It uses intelligent cameras to capture information, such as container number, truck license plate, container door orientation and seal condition, among others as trucks pass through the portals. These data are processed through a video analytics server that uses deep learning to increase recognition and accuracy over time.

As the traditional hardware burden of optical character recognition (OCR) setup is offloaded to deep learning software, Cargoes AVA+ is hardware agnostic and more cost-conscious compared to competing products.

The system automatically transmits data to BCT’s Cargoes TOS+ terminal operating system in real time for seamless data processing. It eliminates manual entry errors and enhances access controls through automatic driver identification. All these features contribute to more efficient gate operations, higher gate capacity and faster truck turnaround time.

Cargoes AVA+ AGS will soon include container damage detection and digital facial recognition functionalities as developers optimize its highly versatile algorithms and dynamic features.