Knots ahead: Scheveningen Harbor
State-of-the-art technology has weighed anchor in Scheveningen Harbor: a video-based solution is using artificial intelligence to register and classify all ships and boats. This ensures greater transparency and security.
Expertise from Bosch and its partner, BrainCreators, has enabled Scheveningen Harbor in The Hague on the North Sea coast of the Netherlands to seamlessly monitor all incoming and departing vessels – a first. It gives those who work in the harbor’s control center greater confidence for mastering the enormous challenges that the towns and cities on the Dutch coast face.
The harbor of Scheveningen has some unique features, it is situated within the borders of the city of the Hague and has a multifunctional character. Combine this with its open character and direct access to the North Sea, it is an important logistical node which is used for a range of activities and a place which is hard to get an overview of. Because of this, the implemented solution helps registering all incoming and outgoing shipping traffic. “This helps in identifying abnormal behavior and identify unsafe movements”, says Niels van Doorn, Senior Manager Solutions & Portfolio at Bosch Energy and Building Solutions in the Netherlands.
Our strength is our ability to think with and for the customer (…), put our experience in industry to work, find tailored solutions, and implement them in a short space of time.
A tailored security solution from Bosch: flexibly developed and quickly implemented
Systems integrator Bosch was commissioned to develop and implement a video solution for enhancing the harbor’s security. The city of The Hague was impressed by the broad experience and expertise that Bosch had acquired in many projects for companies dealing with specific rules regarding high risk environments and the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code. Bosch was therefore directly contracted to develop a concept for Scheveningen Harbor. “Bosch has been supplying a wide spectrum of safety and security solutions for many years. They range from access control across video surveillance all the way to networked management systems,” says Ferry Ditewig, Business Development Manager at Bosch Energy and Building Solutions in the Netherlands. “We have customers in heavy industry, including a chemicals factory in Bergen op Zoom and big industrial plants in the south of the Netherlands, and have also carried out various projects in the Port of Rotterdam. Our strength is our ability to think with and for the customer – it doesn’t matter whether it’s a large or small enterprise – put our experience in the industry to work, find tailored solutions, and implement them in a short space of time.”
No appropriate solution available in the market? Bosch will find one
Following an on-site review, Bosch’s experts concluded that the ideal solution for Scheveningen wasn’t yet available in the market. Most of the boats and ships that enter aren’t required to register, and the harbor itself can’t simply be blocked off. Freighters unload in Scheveningen, fishing boats sail in, and private yachts anchor there, while small rubber boats and rowboats criss-cross between them. Only authorized persons and boats are allowed inside an exclusively commercial port like Rotterdam’s. In stark contrast, Scheveningen Harbor bustles with activity day and night, and the control center has pulled out all the stops to record all the entries and exits.
The Bosch team therefore sat down together with the harbor authority and the municipality of The Hague. “The requirements for this project were very special because they called for a solution that could not only film the traffic, but also register and classify it and even provide information on how fast boats are moving,” recalls Ditewig. “No standard software available today is capable of all that. We therefore suggested developing an AI that could identify and classify vessels, from large ships cross pleasure yachts to rubber boats, and detect any anomalies in the traffic.”
Use of a video-based AI solution instead of paper and pencil
“We trawled our network for a partner with which we could jointly develop a solution,” says Niels van Doorn. The idea was both simple and innovative: two intelligent video cameras would capture the traffic and a specially developed AI classify the type of vessels and save them in a file. “The approach was based on a complex intelligent video solution,” explains Ferry Ditewig. At the harbor’s mouth, where green and red traffic lights guide vessels, two inconspicuous cameras now capture the traffic.
To be able to register vessels, the AI – developed by partner BrainCreators – first had to be trained on image data from the camera to distinguish the many types of ships and boats that can appear. It also had to learn to classify them. “We provided our AI algorithm with a huge collection of photographs to teach it to distinguish among different types of boats and ships,” recalls Glenn Brouwer, Chief Revenue Officer at BrainCreators.
Thanks to the new AI solution, the harbor personnel are now able to monitor the traffic in the harbor and also perform other tasks without missing any vessels. In the past, they had to watch the maritime traffic from the window of the control center nonstop around the clock and enter every one of the roughly 80 vessels that passed through the harbor each day in a notebook. The control center is also responsible for the nearby bridges and tunnels. “If the officer on duty had to briefly exit the room for any reason whatsoever, what happened within the harbor during his or her absence went unnoticed,” says Ditewig about another factor that called for a solution.
Today all of the boat identifiers are seamlessly captured around the clock, documented, stored, and automatically enriched with additional information on the date and time, direction of travel, and velocity. The camera streams are channeled straight into a video management system. Vessels not noticed in real time by on-duty personnel are displayed as still images on the monitor screen. Peak times, ship types, trends, and deviations are determined by analyzing all of the data. “A dashboard gives the staff an overview of all activities in the harbor. The software completely ensures the privacy of filmed persons by blurring their faces. The new video documentation now delivers solid evidence that helps to detect suspicious and abnormal situations more quickly and effectively”, explains Ferry Ditewig. Cees Duvekot, Harbormaster at The Hague municipality is content with the provided solution: "Scheveningen Harbor is a unique and multifunctional place. It is located directly on the North Sea and welcomes both professional and recreational shipping. Scheveningen Haven is also a district where people live, work and recreate. It is therefore important now and in the future to ensure maritime safety and liveability. The use of the registration system by Port Authority employees is going to help with this."
Our solution is so flexible that it can be trained relatively quickly for other, very specific requirements.
Bosch solution not only attractive for harbors and ports
It took only about 12 months to complete the development and planning work and implement the system. Meanwhile there are already quite a few new ideas for taking it to the next level. For example, the system could be extended by adding information from outside sources, like on the weather or tides or from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) for ships. Niels van Doorn explains: “Adding this information can help in identifying anomalies which could point to unwanted traffic and irregular behavior.”
Ferry Ditewig also sees enormous potential for adapting the solution developed for Scheveningen Harbor for other clients or industries. “Large commercial and industrial ports, like those of Rotterdam and Amsterdam, have their own, closed systems because they are able to isolate themselves. Smaller ports and harbors have some catching up to do in terms of security and need modern technical solutions that they can afford. We can offer that, and therefore want to start providing this service as a rental service.”
The AI video solution in Scheveningen can also be deployed in other sectors where it’s necessary to use image data to detect irregularities. “The solution is highly flexible and can be trained to meet other, highly specific requirements relatively quickly,” adds Niels van Doorn.
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Digitalization and artificial intelligence are opening up new possibilities, offering more security, creating comfortable living environments and worlds of work, and making building management more secure and efficient. This requires one thing above all else: an exceptional team like ours at Bosch Energy and Building Solutions. Around 6,000 competent and motivated associates develop, implement and manage state-of-the-art building solutions, combining an excellent customer orientation and technological expertise with high level of enthusiasm.
