Spotlight on AMISIA Project: More efficient port maintenance on the horizon

The Niedersachsen Ports (NPorts), in cooperation with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Mareval AG, has spent three years researching more efficient methods of port maintenance in Emden – the AMISIA Project.

AMISIA stands for “Advanced Port Maintenance: Intelligent, Sustainable, Innovative and Automated Dredging”.

The core idea of the project is to increase the sustainable cost efficiency of port maintenance by largely automating cost-intensive maintenance dredging.

Sebastian Feuerstack, Head of Systems Engineering for Future Mobility at DLR, said: “Nowadays, the technologies, such as in data processing, communication and sensor technology, for the automation of a dredging vessel are widely available.”

“The big challenge, however, is to make them safe. To this end, we have developed test processes in the project to prove the trustworthiness of the systems. We are confident that the first ships will be able to maintain the harbor basin partially automatically and monitored from land in the near future.”

Design

The dredger’s design was optimized to meet the requirements of the Port of Emden.

It supports the following functions:

• recirculation dredging,

• extraction dredging, incl. flushing the dredge spoil onto shore,

• reachability of all the port areas,

• ability to transport sludge and sand.