Hamburg Vessel Coordination Center

HVCC has been a driving force in the area of networking and cross-facility information exchange within the Port of Hamburg for many years. In its efforts to achieve holistic optimisation of vessel arrivals and departures, HVCC coordinates more than 4,400 vessels with 7,300 terminal calls each year.

HVCC uses tailor-made software to manage the coordination of its partners’ mega-ships, feeder ships and inland waterway ships. This software continuously updates ship movements in Northern Europe and coordinates them dynamically with traffic conditions on the river Elbe and within the port. This gives HVCC an overview of all movements across an extensive period of time and geographical area.

A number of HVCC’s customers and partners are already connected to the Center’s overview. The software helps to optimise working and planning processes and enable resources to be used as efficiently as possible. It offers customised interfaces, dashboard solutions and reporting functions as part of the Software as a Service (SaaS) model.

HVCC Software

Both of HVCC’s operational departments use the tailor-made HVCC software for all operational processes. The dashboard offers access to an overview of all movements across an extensive period of time and geographical area and serves as a basis for planning. The resulting optimised arrival and rotation planning yields a significant reduction in the ships’ energy consumption.

A key feature is the number of interfaces with the persons within the port, which enables the terminal and public authority to exchange planning and berth registrations centrally via the HVCC platform (integration of the formerly independent PRISE platform). Relevant status information about the ships is shared with the previous and following ports. Tugs and line handlers can register their responsibility for a ship. Real-time environmental data such as wind and water levels in the Elbe area are pooled and made available. Service providers can be conveniently ordered at the touch of a button. The content can be adapted to meet individual requirements. All this means that there is less internal effort involved in the preparation of overviews for the actors within the port.

project navi-port

Real-time data exchange between ship and port

Alongside the maritime technology provider Wärtsilä and cruise group Carnival, HVCC has now further developed its passage planning and has tested a one-of-a-kind, digital solution for just-in-time ship calls. For the first time the direct, real-time data exchange under real-world conditions between port and ship was realized in order to enable a dynamically optimised Hamburg approach.

The first live tests were carried out on the M/S “AIDAperla” and M/S “AIDAsol” – ships which regularly call at the Port of Hamburg. During these tests, the data shared between the HVCC platform and Carnival Maritime’s Fleet Operation Center in Hamburg was fed directly into the cruise ships’ electronic nautical chart (ECDIS) via the Navi-Port cloud solution developed by Wärtsilä. The continuous, dynamic, real-time data exchange improves coordination and allows for automatic modifications to a ship’s course and speed should conditions at port change during a voyage. The innovative project is also being supported by the classification society Bureau Veritas to ensure that cybersecurity requirements are met. In addition, the internationally renowned management consultancy HPC Hamburg Port Consulting, with its expertise in port-side project management, has significantly accelerated "passage planning 2.0".

Please see our press release for further information.

Please download our White Paper on Just-in-time arrivals here.