business parks near the airport, providing logistics services
to support the food, flower, aerospace, fashion, and life
sciences markets.
Most products arriving at the airport pass through a
streamlined customs process that requires only one stop.
The majority of the cleared freight then leaves Schiphol on
trucks, although some of it is offloaded to rail and canal
barges for transport to distant destinations.
Outbound freight is handled equally quickly as well as
securely. About 80 percent of security checks for outbound
freight are performed remotely, with local shippers scanning their freight at their own facilities using devices that
produce two-sided X-rays of outgoing containers. For
companies that don’t have their own scanning equipment,
the airport has a program to bring mobile scanning vans to
their sites. Nuclear detection vans are also employed at the
airport to scan outgoing cargo.
MAIN PORT OF CALL
The Port of Rotterdam is the largest seaport in Europe
and the ninth largest in the world. It alone accounts for 4
percent of the Dutch gross domestic product (GDP). The
port’s customs area clears more than 7 million containers
each year.
With 75 feet of draft, the Port of Rotterdam can easily
handle any ship currently on the water. It offers 80 terminals for handling bulk, breakbulk, containerized, liquid,
and roll-on/roll-off freight. Last year, it processed 466
million tons of freight, 29 percent of those containerized.
Investment in the port continues each year, with 190 mil-
lion euros (approximately US$203 million) invested in
infrastructure this past year alone.
Strategically located in the heart of Western Europe, the
Port of Rotterdam offers easy access to transportation and
fast reach to major markets. It is here that most intermodal
operations begin. Some 53 percent of received goods depart
by truck. Another 36 percent are loaded onto barges at
adjacent docks, where 200 barge connections take products
farther into the Netherlands as well as to more distant markets in Germany, France, and Switzerland. Some 11 percent
move by rail via 250 weekly rail connections, mainly to
destinations in Germany.
Some containers are transferred from giant vessels to
smaller feeder ships that serve other ports in Europe,
including ports in Ireland, the Baltic and Scandinavian
countries, Spain, and the United Kingdom, as well as ports
along the Mediterranean.
New automated systems in the Port of Rotterdam’s terminals expedite processing and reduce the time a container
spends in the port area. The European Container Terminal
(ECT) at the port is one of the busiest, with 54 cranes handling about 30 ships each week and between 80,000 and
100,000 boxes per week. The cranes used to unload containers from vessels are still operated manually, although the
terminal is experimenting with having operators control
them remotely from an adjacent building.
Once the containers have been deposited on the dock,
fully automated cranes take over, gathering up the containers and loading them onto large automated guided vehicles
(AGVs). The AGVs transport the containers to stacking
areas, where other automated cranes gather the loads and
place them in stacks based on their projected mode of
transit (feeder ship, canal boat, rail, or truck) and time
of departure. About 1. 5 percent of containers need to be
scanned upon arrival, based on their risk assessment. The
AGVs drive these containers through a security scan tunnel
before taking them to the stacks.
When the boxes are ready to be loaded onto a truck chassis, the stacking cranes automatically gather the containers
from the stack and take them to the truck. The automated
process stops just short of placing the box onto the chassis.
At that point, a worker in a remote building takes over,
directing the process with a joystick.
