Name: How AI made Singapore’s ports more efficient
Uploaded: 2025-10-07T18:56:40.000Z
Duration: 9 min 24 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Every minute is precious in global trade.

Basic passive voice

Which is why here at the Port of Singapore, one of the world's busiest shipping hubs, no time is wasted as operations run 24,7 all year round.

Still, not everything runs like clockwork amidst activity.

A silent crisis has been gripping the haulier industry in Singapore, which is a relatively small country.

We have a lot of trucks that are operating within Singapore, almost like close to 3,000 or more.

Generally, the trucking industry globally has some of the key issues are high operational costs and high carbon emissions.

These are attributed to the sub optimal use of resources as well.

The biggest one being manpower shortages in the aging workforce, be it the drivers who are driving the trucks, controllers as we call the planners who are planning the trips for for the drivers.

Trucking is a fragmented industry, which means it still relies on manual processes.

But what if there was a more efficient way to move goods from port to destination?

With rapid urbanization and rising consumer demands, supply chains are being forced to evolve.

This alliance is hoping to help drive that evolution with AI powered halyard planning and location services intelligence.

PSA has been focusing a lot on terminal operations for multiple decades.

So in the last about four to five years we've also started expanding our digital solutions into the community space which is beyond the terminal where we saw that just optimizing what happens inside the terminal is not sufficient to look at the logistics industry or supply chain as a whole.

Optitruck, to put it very simply, is a transport management solution which addresses the trip planning, the trip execution and making sure that we account for all the jobs that we undertook and all the way up to invoicing and billing.

HERE technologies is a location technology and platform company.

What we're using is something called tour planning.

There are many variables to define that tour.

What is this AI model or the machine learning model does to find the best route in that planning phase.

So when a container or the truck has to go from point A to point B or point B to point C, the algorithm is able to efficiently predict what is the best way to move.

The partnership with HERE actually started off with a meeting to share some of the pain points in our industry and the initiatives that we are working on.

For a complex operations like this, one of the fundamental problem is the efficiency.

So our shared vision is to work with PSA to provide efficiency, reduce cost or the downtime where there are empty containers or empty trucks.

Every delivery is made up of an intricate network of ports, hauliers and logistics systems.

As of early 2025, the system had onboarded 400 trucks, acquiring close to 20% of Singapore's market share.

Each truck now handles about 10 to 12 deliveries daily.

Before the system's launch, up to 35% of trips were empty, wasting fuel, labour and maintenance costs.

Unproductive trips effectively means that the truck is not carrying a container.

It's like a taxi is moving without a passenger.

Ever since we have implemented Optitruck Sometime in late 2022, we have seen that they managed to reduce their empty trips almost by 50%.

Cutting empty trips isn't just about logistics.

That's where automation and resource sharing come in.

One is automated scheduling and asset pooling.

So automated scheduling largely focuses on addressing the productivity and efficiency of the controllers who are actually planning the trips.

There are manpower shortages and the aging workforce.

So what happens five years down the line when there aren't many uptakes for the controllers?

Can the system be able to do it automatically based on data and AI?

So there could be cases where I have trucks, but

I don't have enough jobs to do, whereas my partner or my friend has a lot more jobs to do than the number of trucks they have.

Why don't we get together, pool our resources, and

in doing so effectively, we need lesser number of trucks.

But optimizing resources is just one piece of the puzzle.

Real efficiency comes from something even more powerful.

Imagine a concept of a ride hailing app where the truckers are actually being allocated jobs and loads based on their proximity, their job type, the overall competency type.

So tool planning makes use of the underlying layer of location data, which is geocoding attributes.

Point of interest, a normal human eye on a picture can only look at 30, 40 attributes.

But our technologies and what we call within the industry is a digital reality index.

It goes beyond 900 attributes on one static picture.

That is the sheer power to convert those snippets on a picture to usable data.

So a particular sign becomes your speed limit, road sign.

So all this attributes are blended in to give the most accurate result possible.

Now, when the truck hits the road, then a lot of dynamic things happens, right?

You have an accident, traffic congestion, you need to take a detour.

These efficiency gains rely on precise digital mapping.

So how reliable is this approach when faced with the unpredictability of everyday roads?

We have something called unimap methodology, which is the live injection of fresh data coming in from billions of probes, active traffic, government agencies, a Lot of, you know, feeds that comes and gets injected into the overall engine.

The tool is actually designed to give those ETA ATDs in the most correct manner because it directly affects your cost, your serviceability, your user experience and overall ecosystem.

According to PSA, scaling up Optitruck could cut 10 million kg of CO2 emissions annually, the same impact as planting 300,000 trees.

Singapore is committed to lowering emissions with a target of 60 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2030.

By 2050, the vision is even more ambitious.

Our contribution to net zero and the sustainability is to reduce the carbon footprint because it's going to consume less fossil fuel when it is being efficient.

We are seeing lots of EVs also coming into the picture.

These carbon emission savings are actually not for us, but it's for our customers.

On top of the sustainability initiatives that we have undertaken, like electrification of our equipment, we also help our customers by building digital platforms to help them achieve such savings as well.

Singapore launched its next generation tuas Port in September 2022 and expansion will continue over the next two decades with the aim of making it the world's largest, largest fully automated port terminal.

By the 2000 and 40s, Tua's port will be able to handle a capacity of 65 million containers annually, nearly double the volume of all Singapore ports in 2021.

As we scale up Tuas port and go into full capacity operations by 2040, we're also looking into building our PSA supply chain hub which is focusing on cargo operations.

So beyond container trucks, we're also looking at other kinds of cargo movements.

For example, like smaller trucks, they have very unstructured and very fragmented market where people can have one lorry to hundreds of lorries, but

They don't use any planning or transport management system.

So if we fix that particular angle on visibility, how it improves overall port efficiency, that's our goal.

The AI technology is going to be everywhere.

Be it an operation which is like maritime medicine, healthcare, finance.

What this is going to do is deal with more and more data points.

As we are evolving further, we'll be able to handle such volume, such scale and of course there will be very different conditions might come in.

But we believe with our experience dealing with such changes or the evolution of technology over four decades, those experience will come very, very handy.