Supporting Automated Container Terminal Design Processes with 3D Virtual Environments

Recent trends in container terminal design favor automation above manual labor. Automatic container terminals outperform their manual counterparts in terms of twenty-foot equivalent units per year, and they are economically more effective as well. Due to the use of modern technologies, it is not always clear for actors which consequences every decision has on the design. Although technical design drawings are understandable by engineers, they could lack clarity for others, such as business analysts. To overcome this issue, 3D visualizations have often been employed to present future container terminals. However, constructing such visualizations is often time-consuming, expensive, and lacks the flexibility needed through a design process. In this chapter, we present a solution that allows designers to quickly generate 3D environments from technical design drawings. The environment, which is called the “Virtual Terminal,” consists of an AutoCAD plug-in that communicates with a 3D virtual environment. Whenever an updated visualization is needed throughout the design process, this can be realized with minor efforts. The Virtual Terminal has already been used in design processes of major future container terminals, which allowed us to evaluate its usability, usefulness, and usage. The evaluation has been performed both quantitatively (for assessing the usability) and qualitatively (for assessing usefulness and usage).