QINGDAO -- The third phase of China's first independently built automated container wharf was officially put into operation on Wednesday, marking a further breakthrough in the country's development of port construction technology.

At the busy freight terminal of Qingdao Port in east China's Shandong Province where the automated container wharf is based, there are virtually no bridge crane drivers or ground staff in sight.
The process of unloading a container from a ship and then transporting it to the yard used to require at least three drivers and multiple support workers to operate on site, regardless of the weather. Now, in such a full automation scenario, nearly 200 machines are operated almost without human intervention.
Under the scheduling of the terminal's "intelligent brain", the entire handling process has turned digital, smart and unmanned. The former loading and unloading machinery drivers now only need to sit in the remote control room to work on a computer screen instead of doing the manual work on site.
The automatic scheduling system and automatic operation equipment have saved 80 percent of the entire terminal's production manpower, but increased the overall work efficiency by 30 percent, making the wharf more economical and efficient while being green and safer.
When handling a container, from unloading from the ship to delivering to the recipient, there will be multiple steps such as lifting, translation, loading, and turning, creating more than 100 different processes. Therefore, to handle more than 100,000 containers at a wharf at the same time requires a "brain" with strong computing power.
The intelligent container management and control system adopted by the automated terminal at the Qingdao Port has been fully domestically developed from the underlying framework to the upper-layer application.
Researchers at the port have worked together with Chinese enterprises and universities to tackle key technical problems, and produced all of the more than 28,000 parts and components domestically.
The independently developed system is expected to help raise the comprehensive service efficiency of the cargo wharf by 6 percent.
The system has also been applied in some other ports across the country and other parts of the world.