"Five Integrations" of Qinzhou Automated Wharf Breaking Sea-rail Intermodal Transport Containers Get Off, Get On, Get Off

On the vast expanse of the Beibu Gulf, multiple large container ships are entering the port one after another. Bridge cranes, resembling steel giants, precisely lift containers, while intelligent guided vehicles (IGVs) shuttle back and forth. In the U-shaped yard of the automated terminal, rail-mounted cranes move along intelligently planned routes, and container trucks drive directly to their designated berths, completing loading and unloading without the need for transfers.

This is the Qinzhou Automated Container Terminal at Beibu Gulf Port, the first fully automated terminal in the country to achieve seamless sea-rail intermodal transportation. "In the past, sea-rail intermodal transportation required multiple transfers. Now, containers can go 'directly from truck to ship and from ship to truck,' truly achieving seamless connectivity," said Yang Feng, Deputy Manager of the Operations Department at Qinzhou Automated Container Terminal, pointing to the Qinzhou Railway Container Center Station closely connected to the terminal.

As the core gateway hub of the New Western Land-Sea Corridor, Qinzhou Automated Container Terminal focuses on five integrated reforms: operational areas, customs supervision, business marketing, information systems, and production organization. It has pioneered a unique path to resolve bottlenecks in multimodal transportation, achieving sea-rail intermodal transfer times of no more than 1.7 hours per trip, open-sea transfer efficiency of 12.5 minutes per trip, and significantly enhancing hub connectivity efficiency.

The efficiency improvements stem from breakthroughs in both physical space and digital barriers.

Qinzhou Automated Container Terminal has globally pioneered a U-shaped layout design. Compared to terminals that commonly use end-point operational modes, construction and maintenance costs are significantly reduced. Terminal staff further explained: "The terminal has a depth of 1,000 meters. Under the traditional vertical layout, external vehicles could only queue at the end of the yard, and automated rail-mounted cranes had to shuttle back and forth continuously, resulting in high energy consumption and low efficiency." The U-shaped lane layout features multiple loading and unloading points and flexible container handling. By 2025, the average operation time for external container trucks at the terminal is expected to remain under 15 minutes.

To address physical barriers, the terminal has promoted the integration of operational areas and customs supervision, dismantling perimeter fencing to achieve "external-to-internal" transfers, reducing the need for entry and exit at gates, and shortening the single transfer distance by nearly 1 kilometer.

Meanwhile, the Qinzhou Port area has established a sea-rail intermodal information platform, becoming the first in the country to achieve real-time data integration between port and rail operational systems. Core operational data can now be exchanged within minutes. Leveraging multi-source heterogeneous information fusion technology, the processing time for heterogeneous data integration is reduced to less than 0.6 seconds, and cross-domain path planning responses take less than 1 second, providing real-time support for the coordinated scheduling of vehicle, ship, and container resources.

To tackle challenges involving cross-operational entities, automation levels, and transportation modes across three heterogeneous domains—automated terminals, manual terminals, and railway center stations—the technical team has innovatively developed a hybrid traffic model for smart ports. By integrating multimodal sensing and deep learning technologies, they have advanced cross-domain transportation technology for intelligent guided vehicles (IGVs), enabling seamless navigation across scenarios and intelligent cluster management. Currently, the composite navigation IGVs and traditional rubber-tired gantry cranes achieve a pairing success rate of over 95%, parking precision of approximately 5 centimeters, and active obstacle avoidance success rate exceeding 99.9%. After official operation, cross-domain transfer efficiency is expected to increase by over 10%.

From dismantling perimeter fencing and integrating data to advancing technology and promoting fusion, intermodal transportation efficiency is increasingly evident. As the opening of the Pinglu Canal approaches, the expansion and reconstruction of berths 7 to 10 in the southern operational area of the Qinzhou Dalanping Port Zone are progressing at full speed. The terminal will also simultaneously construct five 5,000-ton river-sea intermodal automated container berths. In the future, thousand-ton cargo ships arriving from the Pinglu Canal will be able to achieve rapid "ship-to-ship" transfers with ten-thousand-ton ocean-going vessels docked here.