KPI calculation to increase productivity of container cranes

When it comes to port logistics, time is money. In order to identify existing bottlenecks more easily and thus to exploit optimization potentials, a multinational logistics company decided to take a closer look at the operation of their container cranes. Therefore, the iba system was installed in four Australian ports with five to seven loading cranes each and became an eye-opener for the company: For the first time, the customer had a central and complete overview of the crane operation in all ports. In addition to the capacity utilization, the planning of the preventive maintenance was improved permanently.

Business Benefits

Central and complete overview
of crane operation in all ports

Improvement of maintenance schedules
and introduction of a preventive maintenance concept

Determination of the life span
of a crane based on actual usage

The Technology

For each loading and unloading cycle of a crane, the logistics company specified about 30 relevant KPIs. These were to be extracted into a central database. In the installed iba system, the crane data is acquired via ibaPDA-PLC-Xplorer, with about 20 signals being acquired per crane. In a further step, the requested parameters are calculated event-driven via macros and functions of ibaAnalyzer and extracted into an SQL database with the help of ibaDatCoordinator and ibaDatCoordinator-DB. For each port, one virtualized ibaPDA system and one ibaHD-Server are used. During the entire duration of the project, iba Oceania took care of the engineering and commissioning of the solution.