On Assessing the Potential of 5G and beyond for Enhancing Automated Barge Control

As the shipping sector has been one of the major impact factors on economic growth over the past decades, its digitalization is expected to make unprecedented improvements in the safety and reliability of ship control, thereby ultimately enabling the autonomous operations of ships. The automated control of ships will not only mitigate the risks of human mistakes but will also improve the efficiency of operations by preventing unexpected delays while being environmentally sustainable. With the advent of the Internet of Ships (IoS) sector, well-known and mature concepts of the Internet of Things (IoT) are being applied to ships and ports, thereby making them more and more equipped with sensing and communication capabilities that set the ground for improved situational awareness and better decision-making. However, there are many challenges that need to be thoroughly studied, such as the communication between barges, ports, and services, as increased network latency and limitations on the bandwidth imposed by satellite communications could introduce significant risks for accident occurrence, ultimately affecting the overall automated operation/teleoperation of barges. In this paper, we present one of the first attempts to test the potential of 5G systems for automating barge operations, starting from teleoperation as an enabler of automation, thereby creating and validating a cellular-based automated barge control system in a real-life environment. In this system, the barge is sailing in a busy port area such as one of the Port of Antwerp Bruges, while being connected to the 5G network. We assess the quality of the 5G communication system and present and discuss our initial results on the enhancements that 5G could bring to teleoperation and automation of the barge control.