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In the Chinese port of Dalian, hundreds of shipping containers are piled up full of frozen fish.
Here in the far east of the giant country is a focus of fish imports.
One reason for the jam in the steel boxes is the strict control of the food for corona viruses, as ordered by the government.
In response, the shipping companies are heading for other ports such as Shanghai or Qingdao with their frozen containers.
But clearance is hardly faster elsewhere either.
After all, many port cities still lack truck drivers and workers to be able to transport the goods away.
The traffic jams are getting longer.
The average delay in a container shipment out of China is a good five days - compared to a single day in January 2020, as calculated by the shipping agency Ocean Insights.
Worldwide, the seaports in Asia, the USA and Europe do not work in sync.
The pandemic leads to delays, partly because of the bottlenecks or controls, but partly also because of the rapidly increasing transport volumes.
But for many years the seaports have become the bottleneck of globalization.
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Often the geographical location of the port locations hardly allows any more space to be expanded.
Homemade problems like those in the largest German port in Hamburg also lead to delays in expanding capacity.
Prototype in the United Arab Emirates
The space for stacking becomes tight, and there are limits to how things can be transported by road or rail.
But the numbers continue to rise: Last year there were 157 million containers (TEU Twenty Foot Equivalent Unit, 20-foot standard size) that were transported across the oceans worldwide, by 2023 it should be 175 million units.
The goal of developing a so-called smart port, an intelligent port that uses digitization through to the use of artificial intelligence for processes, is a long way off.
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That could all change now.
Because a long-established company from the German steel industry is working together with a partner from Dubai there.
The SMS Group, which emerged from the mechanical engineering company Siemag and belongs to the Heinrich Weiss family, has developed an automated high-bay warehouse for this purpose.
The prototype is in the port of Jebel Ali and is currently being tested extensively by Dubai Ports World.
The system is to run in everyday operation from May onwards.
It will be presented at the world exhibition Expo in Dubai, which has been postponed to 2021.
Principle has proven itself in car garages
The port operator from the United Arab Emirates wants to convert up to 20 of its currently 78 worldwide locations in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Europe to the model.
Whether Antwerp will also be part of it, where Dubai Ports World operates a large terminal, is still open.
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The challenge is to be able to store and handle more containers in the same area in the port than has been possible with conventional systems up to now.
And all of this should happen at a faster pace.
The answer comes from the principle of a car garage: SMS Group is building an autonomously working high-bay warehouse directly on the quay wall.
The process takes place in the shortest possible ways: container cranes lift the steel boxes out of the cargo ship at the quay wall and place them on an automated transport vehicle.
When they arrive in the high-bay warehouse, the containers are lifted to the individual rack levels by vehicles on rails and finally by crane systems and later removed there again for onward transport on land.
Eleven floors full of high-tech logistics
The system called Boxbay consists of a steel frame with eleven floors.
Today it is usual to have a maximum of six container layers on top of each other, i.e. just half of them.
For the parent company, however, this is not new: For decades, the SMS Group has been working in steel and aluminum rolling mills with similar technology and storing so-called steel collies weighing up to 50 tons in high racks.
The port operators are not only under pressure from the current bottlenecks, but also from the trend towards new ship sizes.
After all, 7,000 containers have to be handled by a single giant ship within twelve hours so that the timetables can be adhered to.
That is why the port companies do everything in their power to be able to unload and load as many cargo ships as possible on their quay walls in the shortest possible time.
The height of up to 30 meters and the degree of automation are the new features of this system.
"With our technology, ten to 15 percent more containers can be handled over a kilometer of the quay edge," says Mathias Dobner, Managing Director of Boxbay.
The port workers know via a computer system which container can be found where.
Cameras and numbers ensure that each steel box is assigned to a fixed shelf space.
The computer allows heavy boxes to be set down at the bottom and light boxes to be stacked at the top.
Since several cranes are working at the same time, the handling rate is high.
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Space is money in the ports.
In conventionally built port facilities, around 900 standard containers fit on one hectare of space.
"With our high-bay warehouse, this can be expanded to up to 3000 containers per hectare," says Dobner.
With the same number of containers, only a third of the floor space is required.
Jobs are supposedly not to be lost on a large scale.
The growth in turnover will create new work and compensate for the loss of individual activities, it is said.
There are confident voices from practice.
"The need to use the space in a container port more effectively is emerging right now," says Detthold Aden, long-time CEO of the Bremer Logistics Group.
Since containers are being stored longer and longer in port locations and arriving goods are often sorted and reassembled in the port, space requirements are a huge problem.
“The port operators are all struggling with limited space.
A high-bay warehouse can be a solution to the problem, ”says Aden.
The manager has built the largest car repair shop in Europe in Bremerhaven and is familiar with the challenges of structural change.
There are restrictive voices in science.
"These systems could be used by all ports that have limited space and want to achieve particularly high handling rates," says Frank Straube, head of the logistics department at the Technical University of Berlin, in an interview with WELT.
However, the model should not be an isolated component, it should rather become part of an automation concept.
For the scientist, the cost and performance disadvantage of some German ports in European competition is related to the fact that they started automation late.
Instead of new buildings, Manager Dobner is also relying on the renovation of existing port facilities.
"Around 80 percent will be conversions," says the mechanical engineer from the Technical University of Aachen.
He reckons with "one or two orders a year".
Costs can be up to 15 percent higher
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In addition to Dubai Ports and PSA from Singapore, the Maersk subsidiary APM Terminals and Hutchison Whampoa from Hong Kong are the world's dominant port operators and thus potential customers for pilot projects.
Dobner, who also worked on the most modern German container port in Hamburg Altenwerder, mentions around 500 million euros as an investment for a conversion of this type.
The effort for the foundation is particularly high.
Compared to previous models, the Boxbay system is said to be up to 15 percent more expensive.
In return, the energy costs fall: The electricity for the crane systems should be photovoltaic systems on d900 standard containers on an area of one hectare.
"With our high-bay warehouse, this can be expanded to up to 3000 containers per hectare," says Dobner.
With the same number of containers, only a third of the floor space is required. More than three times as many containers can be accommodated in the same area in the construction.
Loading happens fully automatically, like creating the roof of the high-bay warehouse in a robot garage - in Dubai that is probably the least problem.
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