Port traffic management
Real-time ground-truth insights for smarter operations.
Most ports have gate data. Almost none have visibility into what happens before the gate, between gate and exit, or after trucks leave.
Long truck queues, inefficient yard movements, and cut-through traffic on residential streets all share a common cause: a lack of real-time data on where trucks are, how long they are waiting, and what is causing the delay. SMATS gives port authorities and terminal operators continuous visibility from gate entry to yard exit, so decisions about gate allocation, staff scheduling, and yard operations are based on measured performance, not manual observation. Three situations where this data changes outcomes.
Gate wait times and turnaround times are measured manually, if at all
Most ports track when trucks check in at the gate and when they exit. What they don't have is the data in between: how long trucks waited in the queue before reaching the gate, how long they spent at the scale, and how long they sat idle at pickup and dropoff locations inside the yard. Without this data, port operations teams can't identify where bottlenecks are forming or make proactive adjustments before queues reach the street.
Truck congestion spills onto surrounding roads and into residential communities
When gate queues back up beyond the port boundary, trucks don't simply wait; they reroute through residential streets and local roads to avoid the congestion. These cut-through routes generate community complaints, create safety concerns near schools and residences, and expose port authorities to regulatory and political pressure. Origin-destination analysis of truck movements identifies which routes are being used, enabling evidence-based conversations with community stakeholders and municipal governments.
Port competitiveness depends on landside efficiency, and the data to demonstrate it
Port efficiency is a key contributor to overall port competitiveness. Truck congestion disrupts operations, increases service rates, creates uncertainty for logistics providers, and makes ports less competitive in the long run. Real-time landside mobility data gives port authorities and terminal operators the visibility to proactively manage truck movements, along with the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to demonstrate operational performance to shipping companies, drayage operators, and government stakeholders.
Our solutions
Truck gate wait time and turnaround time monitoring
- Deploy TrafficXHub Bluetooth sensors and beacons to capture exact truck gate wait times and turn times, updated continuously, not reported after the fact
- Use iNode to generate both real-time, predictive, and historical metrics to inform planning and optimization
- Build custom dashboards to visualize key metrics and align all stakeholders
- Separate wait time (queue to gate) from dwell time (time being serviced) so operations teams know where the bottleneck actually is
Inside-the-yard truck movement monitoring
- Monitor truck flows from gate entry to scale, storage, pickup, and exit using BLE beacons and TrafficXHub sensors, measuring route times and idle times at each stop
- Leverage GPS data to uncover origin-destination insights on surrounding roadways
- Supports strategic (asset acquisition), tactical (asset utilisation), and operational (real-time) decision-making
Cut-through route detection & community impact analysis
- Identify which residential streets and local roads trucks are using to avoid port congestion, with timestamped frequency data
- Origin-destination analysis of truck movements before and after port access, showing which corridors carry the most freight traffic
- Share documented route data with community stakeholders and municipal governments to address neighbourhood concerns with evidence
- Supports gate scheduling and access route design decisions to reduce cut-through traffic at the source
Seamless integrations of landside data with
- Microsoft Power BI
- Truck appointment systems
- Terminal operating systems (TOS)
- Automatic identification system (AIS)
- Variable message signs (VMS)
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Built by traffic engineers. Shared through insight.
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