钦州自动化码头“五个一体化”破解海铁联运堵点 集装箱下车即上船、下船即上车

On the vast expanse of the Beibu Gulf, numerous large container ships are entering the port one after another. Bridge cranes, like 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 gantry cranes move along intelligently planned routes, and container trucks drive directly to their designated berths, completing loading and unloading without the need for transshipment.

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 transport. "In the past, sea-rail intermodal transport required multiple transfers. Now, containers can go 'directly from truck to ship and from ship to truck,' truly achieving seamless connection," said Yang Feng, deputy manager of the operations department at the 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, the Qinzhou Automated Container Terminal has adopted a unique approach to resolving bottlenecks in multimodal transport by focusing on the "five integrations" of operational areas, customs supervision, business marketing, information systems, and production organization. This has enabled sea-rail intermodal transfer times to be reduced to less than 1.7 hours per trip, open-sea transfer efficiency to reach 12.5 minutes per trip, and significantly improved hub connectivity efficiency.

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

The Qinzhou Automated Container Terminal is the first in the world to adopt a U-shaped process layout. Compared to terminals that commonly use end-loading operations, construction and maintenance costs are significantly reduced. Terminal staff further explained: "The terminal has a depth of 1,000 meters. In the traditional vertical layout, external vehicles could only queue at the end of the yard, and automated rail-mounted gantry 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, removing perimeter fencing to enable "external-to-internal" transfers, reducing the need for one gate entry and exit, and shortening the single transfer distance by nearly 1 kilometer.

Meanwhile, the Qinzhou Port area has established a sea-rail collection and distribution information platform, becoming the first in the country to achieve real-time data integration between port and rail operation systems. Core operational data can now be exchanged within minutes. Leveraging breakthroughs in multi-source heterogeneous information fusion technology, heterogeneous data processing takes no more 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 address the challenges of cross-operational entities, automation levels, and transport modes in the three heterogeneous fields of 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 tackled cross-domain transport technology for intelligent guided vehicles with composite navigation, achieving seamless operation across scenarios and intelligent cluster management. Currently, the alignment success rate of composite navigation IGVs with traditional rubber-tired gantry cranes exceeds 95%, parking accuracy is about 5 centimeters, and active obstacle avoidance success rate exceeds 99.9%. After official operation, cross-domain transfer efficiency is expected to improve by more than 10%.

From removing perimeter fencing and integrating data to tackling technical challenges and promoting integration, the efficiency of intermodal transport continues to improve. With the opening of the Pinglu Canal drawing closer, the expansion and renovation of berths 7 to 10 in the Dalinping South Operation Area of Qinzhou's Dalinping 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.