eSmartRoute

Inspiration

On 23rd March 2021, Suez Canal obstruction by a vessel has blocked the passage for 6 days and delayed around 300 vessels leading to $54 billion global trade loss. This incident has become very famous that most of the world has come to know that a vessel disaster can cause a huge loss. This is not a first incident and not a last one as well. There are many incidents which are reported.

There were 49 large ships lost in 2020 and 48 in 2019 and the loss is not only to the economy but to the environment as well surrounding the emissions. Courtesy: https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-marine-accidents

The reasons for the shipping disasters can be because of poor decision making, frequent climate changes, increase in pirated areas, fire accidents, faulty equipment, and many. A short video shared here shows how frequent the shipping disasters are. Courtesy: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1Fdosu4Okp0

This made us to think about the solution where we can possibly guess the risks and mitigate them with analytics

What it does

The application is built to:

Suggest Next best routes using predictive and adaptive analytics considering real-time ocean data and other parameters such as Origin, Destination, Dynamics of Vessel, Weight of the consignment, Depth of water, Tide height, Wind speed, Pirated areas, Protected areas, Climate changes, Traffic etc.
Digitize the dynamic route planning.

How we built it

We Built 'eSmartRoute' on Pega 8.7.3 by leveraging Pega Decisioning capabilities and Pega out-of-the-box features as below.

Ingesting available routes, ocean data.
Simulating scorecard generation for each route from Origin to Destination and suggesting the best routes based on Scoring.
Sending notifications to Captain for Route approvals.

Challenges we ran into

Below are the challenges we faced:

Limited availability of open sources for and real-time ocean data.
Time constraints in integrating with Maps and display of all the suggested routes on single Map with more features.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Picking a challenging use case and building a prototype with available sources.
Time taken to prepare sample data to ingest into the application.

What we learned

Common reasons for shipment disasters
Leveraging Pega Decisioning, it is very easy to solve the biggest problem of optimizing the shipping routes for safe and efficient voyage.

What's next for eSmartRoute

Integration with a. Real-time ocean data sources b. Radio stations for communication c. Map integration to show the Sea traffic, Cargo journey
Enable Ship tracking on Maps.
Collaborate with industry SMEs to pick other priority use cases and extend the application.
Extend application to address all the reasons for shipment disasters and minimise the risks.