Webinar: Discover PortALL, the revolutionary tool for port services

Well, first of all, thank you everyone for being here at this presentation directed towards our portal tool developed by geomod. I suppose that some of you may not know who we are, therefore we expect to organise this meeting that way. First of all, a short presentation about our company, our missions and about the tool portal itself. And after that we will make a quick run through the application so you can understand a little bit better, better the functionalities. So, first of all, let's introduce a Coexia Group, which is a company we are running today. Coexia is a company specialised in digitalization solution and consulting. We have three main fields or categories of expertise. I should say the first of all is a consulting. After that we have the integration of digital solution into companies and of course the main one, so software developer. So among the different kind of industries we are working with, we have of course quite a diverse set of partners and companies which are sometimes directed towards banking or towards industry itself, or towards software development, roughly and brutally, which is why today I think it might be interesting to introduce a little bit better one of our business units, GeoMod by Coexia, which is the main actor of today's presentation. So, just so you know, Geomod has been acquired by Coexia Group in 2021. Before that and still today we had three fields of expertise which include hydraulic engineering, marine geomatics and wave modelling. So, as you may guess, we are going to focus today on the second aspect, marine geomatics. So this aspect covers quite a wide range of fields. Actually we have different kind of expertise in this specific business unit. First of all, nautical charting, which includes production of charts, edition of charts dedicated to harbours and pilots. We have different kind of services directed towards the publication and the use of the same unity charts. And we have also, as you may guess, associated businesses with harbours and different hydrographic services and offices. Among the several partners that we are working with currently, as that we expect to work with in the future, we have several arbours. We have, perhaps you may know some of them, famous organisms in France directed towards the exploitation of the sea. And most of all we have hydrographic offices and chart producers and users, including the Charms, the French Hydrographic Office. We are working mainly with arbours today with our tool portal, which is really dedicated to this industry. By discussing with our partners the ones that we had and the ones that we have today, we understood the needs for digitalization of the arbour infrastructures. It is something that is quite primordial, especially given the fact that all harbour workers need to have the same information at the right time, at the right moment. Therefore, of course, including the fact that harbour infrastructures might be quite significant in terms of dimensions and personnel, we understand the fact that we need to have an optimised way of transmitting information. So, roughly speaking, pilots need to know which services are available at the right time, at the right moment. And given the environmental conditions, harbour masters need to know which ships are entering the ports and which pilots and persons are available. And of course, all these information need to be gathered and centralised by the hydrographers. We need to provide security information to the later mentioned workers. Sorry, of course, all these learnings has been gathered by discussing with our current partners. As I say, as you may see on the left of the picture, most of our workers, most of our partners are harbour workers from France. During the last few years, we have realised that there was a need also for unintelligation of our services. We understood the fact that since working with Fenchabels led us to understand that the need for this ratification was a French thing, international workers, sorry, needed also to get this kind of challenge going on. So today, by discussing with the pilots and the harbour masters for France, we understood also that other of the partners located outside of Europe, or in Europe as well, but not in France, needed to face those challenges. Therefore, let's talk a little bit more about the tool Portal, which is today's main objective, of course. So by portal, as it was previously mentioned, we started to understand which needs were gathered by the harbour masters, the hydrographers and the pilots, and in general, other people involved in the harbour industry. We wanted the tool to be as dynamic and as user friendly as possible. Therefore, the tool is able to run on different kind of supports which include laptops, smartphone, tablets and touch screens. In general, as a matter of fact, you can also board the tool on a pure portable unit if necessary. Portall is intended to be modular and can be used with several kind of functionalities and a wide range of applications. These applications can be quite diverse and of course you might need to select the ones that are actually directed towards your industry. We'll get to that later, if you allow me. But most importantly, Portal is a tool directed towards one purpose, communication, an optimised and reliable communication. Given the fact that the harbour is quite a wide world, every workers need to have at the same time the right and accurate information. So all of that combined give us present tools that we are proud to present and proud to introduce. We have mentioned a few of the harbours we are working with currently. They all trust the tool and they seem to be quite happy about it, from what we have heard of that. So we have, of course, French arbores mainly, and Britain arbores also, because we're quite chauvinistic. But the fact that they work with the tool provide just one thing. First of all, professionals are quite happy about what it provides, and second, they provide us with their return and they use their experience, which is quite useful for us, to improve the tool. This application is in constant development. We need to work on it, we will have to work on it, and we are working on it to make it better and better. Today, for example, with the new challenges offered by the increase in digitalization, we understand that new perspective might be offered to the tool and to the workers in general. Therefore, all of that brings new ideas which can be consulted internally and which can be shared with the partners in order to make it available for the next releases and versions of the tool. So there are actually quite a lot of profiles, worker profiles, which can work with a tool. But today we are going to focus on three of them. Hydrographers, pilots and harbour managers. First of all, as it was stated, Portal is intended to be modular. You have here, I can say, a shallow extract of the number of functionalities as the tools offer. They might not be useful to every categories of workers. We have, for example, hydrographers, which might not be interested in the AIs data, harbour masters, which might not be interested in hydrography, and pilots will be interested in all of them. Therefore, it is crucial really that users might be able to make their shopping list, if I may say, and to select only in these modules which one are interesting to them. Let's give you a short example about the functionalities that are actually included here. For example, we have a screenshot of all of our partners using the tool in real time. So, as you can see, we have the RAS data, we have the weather data, and you are able to interrogate the different features which are included in the ENC layer. If you don't understand this parameter acronym, I will explain it in further details, but I think it might require a little bit of a single webinar in itself. I'll just go through it as best as I can. So, first of all, I get back to that module idea. Here is an extended list of what kind of modules you might expect in your portal application. As you can see, some of them are useful to use specific field of expertise. Some of them might not be. Therefore, the main purpose is to actually select which one you want and which one you want. To include in your specific profile. So the tool is quite wide. It covers a lot of functionalities which include charting, which include exchange of real time data, notifications and user layers. You might be able to edit the chart in itself under specific conditions that we'll explain later. And you will need as well to understand which are the needs of your fellow colleagues working on different fields of expertise within the airports. But all of that combined gives you an extended set of functionalities for exchanges. So, first of all, let's cover a little bit of the reduced lists of portal modules which might be useful for you to understand a little bit better what kind of features we might have for hydrographers. We have the Ulysses module which is internally developed by Geomod and that we will cover in the later slides. We have the notices which actually danger sent to the harbour workers and to the mariners and to the pilots in case of specific conditions that might be a threat to them. And we have of course, the obstructions which might represent a manasse for the pilots and the ships entering the harbour infrastructures. For harbour masters. Of course, most of the functionalities will be directed towards communication. They will need to gather all the nodes and the real time information notices that the pilots, hydrographers and meteorologists might gather. All of that, if I may say, to be the headmaster of all of the operations going on at the same time in the harbour. We have also the replay functionality in case of an incident within the harbour. This feature is quite useful if needed, to replay and to rehearse the incident and to understand what went wrong. For harbour pilots we have of course, everything directed towards the course and towards the root of the ship. If they need to have some specific information about the availability of the bursts of the harbour tools as cranes and bollards, they might need to have an update of what they might need and what they might have at this position. Therefore, all of that is directed toward an operational side of things and most importantly a planning, a safe planning in order to avoid any incidents and to optimise the displacement of the ships. Of course, all of these functionalities start from the bottom, which is constituted of main and basic functionalities. You have of course, what you might see in main sig. Sorry, tools, which covers the course and distance that you need to cover. When you're on board of your ship, you might need to visualise clearly what you have on your interface, whether it is phone, whether it is laptop, whether it is tablet. You need to have an optimised display of the information and most importantly, you need to be able anytime and everywhere to optimise the visualisation and display of all the information. All of that actually is directed towards another purpose, which is readability. Readability and accuracy are today the two main aspects that chart must cover and even digitalized charts and features do not make an exception. Therefore, the main idea behind Portal is to actually make sure that the information displayed on the screen are not too redundant and can be played with in order for the user to optimise the presentation's display of the information proposed through the tool. So you have to put your shopping list of modules, as it says, but you have different kind of categories of services, which includes not only the layer of display, but also the modules for real time information. And of course, what you want to do when you are planning your route, which includes planning the traceability, planning the distance that you have to cover in order to land a berth, for example, planning the rules that you have to do in order to avoid another ship, for example, and all of that actually categorised in an optimised way in order for you to find quickly and safely what you need at the right time. We told you about Ulysses shortly in the previous slides. Let's tell you about some things that might be quite interesting to hydrographers, but also to other workers. First of all, I think you might need a little bit of a lesson, if need, about the charts and numerical charts in general. So we are an ENC producer, a certified ANC producer. Therefore we are allowed by the AHO International Hydrographic Organisation, to produce numerical charts in accordance to a specific standard, which is the S57 Geomo today is able to produce this chart, and we do that often for the harbours who works for it by providing us with their batimetry data that they gather themselves. But we are also working in collaboration with the shom, which is the official hydrographic office in France. The SHOM produces the charts for specific navigational purposes, such as approaches such as coastal. But the harbours might need some more precise encs, electronic navigational charts, which is why sometimes our partners may come to us with their bathymetric survey and ask us to produce them a more reliable chart, a more precise one for the bursting navigational purpose. So this kind of charts does not cover the same area, of course, as the one produced by the shom, but they are more precise, which is something quite reliable when it's needed for bursting prospect, for example. So here is for the lesson about S57 standard and ENCs. ENCs are electronic navigational charts and NS57 the standard managing the encoding. Regarding this previous lesson, it is time to introduce you about ulis, which is the main purpose of this section. ULIS is an automated tool and a portal module which, based on the surveys realised by the harbours, performs a production the automat production of the S57 chart, which will be immediately applied in the portal interface. The main idea behind that is that you do not lose time to produce the charts based on the basimetry. It is done automatically by an internally developed algorithm from GeoMod and this will be automatically updated within the tool. The advantage is that you no longer have to lose time and to waste time, if I may say, to upload, dislode the different charts and the outdated biosymetry charts. It is done automatically and most importantly, your cartographers will not lose time anymore to process the batymetry data sets, since this is done automatically by the tool. Another functionality of ULIS is selectability. Ulysses, make sure that the survey data set that you have on your display is actually the most up to date. For example, if there is an overlap between two consecutive surveys, Ulysses will make sure that the one selected is the most up to date and therefore the most reliable. So all of that to ease a task for hydrographers, but to secure the way for mariners also. So we have also different kind of functionalities which are divided once again in different kind of expertise. Batymetry is one thing, but routing is actually another one. When you have the batyometry updates displayed on your chart in an updated way, you are sure that you can select the most secure route for the ships entering the harbours. This is a crucial point that is actually some kind of communication prospects between the pilots and the hydrographers. Of course, you might need sometimes to update these information. Given the dimensions of your ship. You cannot expect Supertanker to take the same route as a small pilot boat. So ulis, excuse me, helps you to select the functionality most suited for this purpose. More detailed description of ULIS might be given as documentation, but you will have also to consider the different kind of infrastructure you have in the RBUs. Therefore, each bathymetric environment will differ, sorry, from the different purpose that you have for the routing prospects. You will need to select the accurate one. You will need to do everything that you need in comparison with what the pilots need. But after that, once the setting is done, you will just have to run the tool and to wait for it to make the update automatically. Now, a more high level description of the features covered by Portal. We describe the modules, but perhaps Better overview might be needed in order to understand what you can include in your profile. We have some real time aspects, some planning aspects and some present aspects. I think that the demonstrations that we are going to cover in the next step of this webinar might be useful, but you have here an overview of what the tours include. You have the passage plan, for example, given the templates and the dimensions of your ship. You might need for example to know which route is the safest and which one can be applied to the pilot's planning where the ship placement given, once again, the template of your ship, the underkill clearance management might need to be considered specific. Specifically given the passymetry that you have. And this is also available in the Portal tool with alerts. Of course you have the real time data given by the eis. We are able to encode the NMEA trains and we are able to extract information about the routing of the ships that you have on the harbours. We have the opportunity to have the notifications that are provided by the all the ships and the other people involved in the harbour. We have the opportunity to interrogate the S57 features included in the interface and we are able to simply modify under specific conditions the features that you have on the chart. If it is done of course by the harbour. We told you about the replay module, this one is actually quite useful for the harbour masters when you need to update or upgrade. If I may say, you practises in terms of bursing or simply if there was an accident, this happens. Sadly you might need to replay the specific operations which led to the inconvenient accidents that you observed. Therefore the replay is quite useful for this specific purpose. Once again, if I needed to cover and to make an exhaustive cover of all the functionalities of Portal, I'm afraid this webinar would last one week. Therefore, what I will do will be a short cover of the Portal functionalities by a quick run through at the end of this presentation and you will be able to ask me any question. We will send you this presentation at the end of the webinar. Therefore you will be able to see all the videos and all the features which are included in it. Please feel free to interrupt me if you have any question and let me know if you have an interrogation at that point of the presentation. If not, we are going to proceed now and to go through the run through of the presentation of the tool. Sorry, so far, no question. I take that as a no. So here you can see the Interface of the portal 2. We are here covering the coast of Brittany, which is according to people living there, the most beautiful in the world. But we have a BS portal view. I'm afraid the default views that you can see here is actually the one with most layers disabled. We have the coastlines, of course, we have the depth areas, we have the oceanic zone. But we have no layer activated in terms of ENC display and in terms of batimetry. So let's make a quick run through about the layers when they are activated. First of all, the metadata of the enc. The icons you see here, if you are not familiar with the display, are regarding the quality of the batimetric data. We are able to display as well the A2 navigations successively. You just display them if they are needed. We are able to provide as well information about the topography. If the landmarks displayed on the charts are not enough to position the ship, we are able to apply the restrictions. So as you can perhaps as you may know, Brest, so the harbour we are covering right now is a military area with a lot of restrictions. Sadly. We also display dangers within the water rocks. And we are able to provide information about the bathymetry itself, including the soundings and including the hydrography. So here you can see the depth contour will just appear if needed. But this might be exceptional. I beg your pardon. You are able to apply as well as the auto photography so you can have a clearer view of how it works and where you are located. This is an add on which can be useful when you have some prison ships. We are not necessarily adding the aisle and might provide additional visual information which might be of course news. Now that we are all the ENC layers activated, we can focus a little bit more on the extended functionalities. For what we got bat symmetry. I told you about Ulysses and the automated functionality of providing ENC charts. If we zoom a little bit on the arbour areas, you will be able to view that the breast arbour ordered some charts to be produced by geomod. Some specific bursting charts with a more precise detail than the one of the show Here you can see the difference between the official ENC and talking about enc. You can also see the different kind of covers that we have available. And regarding the hydrography provided by the arbours, we are then able to provide a more precise bathymetry based on the cloud points they provided through their bath symmetric survey. So this is quite useful, especially when they need to have more detailed sounding when the pilots are entering the area. Sometimes the details of depths and soundings and bath Symmetry in general provided by the official charts might not be enough. They might require some specific and more specific shows, details about soundings itself. Regarding the real time data, we are here dealing with a demo option of the tool so we have less functionalities as the one you can see on our partners, for example, but we are able to provide real time information regarding the AIs. For example, we are able to interrogate the layer and to deal with the view of the different ships entering or going out of the harbours. Let's suppose, for example, that we want to interrogate a specific ship. You are able simply to pinpoint on this one and to view more details about the ship itself. We just wait for the portal to reload a little bit. So my connection is not as good as it is. It's a demo effect. I'm sorry about that. Here it is. When you interrogate a specific ship, you might be able to display the different information which are extracted from the AIs messages. So this includes, through the NMEA protocol, the length of the ship, its route, its width, for example, and given the details that you can have included in the near MA train, some specific aspects including the MMC numbers, the coordinates and basically everything that might be needed for pilots in order to optimise their routes given the entrance and manoeuvres in general of other ships. Now we can exhibit you and the weather. Sorry, and the tide aspects. This is a demo. So therefore we do not provide any planning and any predictions for tidal measures. But given the fact that we are working closely with the Hydrographic Office for other entrances, for example, for real harbours, we might be able to provide prediction data. But this is needed to be discussed with the Hydrographic Office itself. Now let's talk about for example, the planning phase and what you might do in order to optimise the berthing of your ship. We have some functionalities which regard the ship placement. It was briefly explained in the presentation, but I think it might be interesting to see it directly. First of all, if you're a pilot, you might need to optimise the placement of the ship you are dealing with. This might be done given the template of the ship, which includes its length and simply its route and the dimension it needs in order to burst safely. For that you are able to do that in two ways. Either you create your ship placement device based on the information you have from the captain, or or you use a patron based on what the send captain might provide. Here we might be able, for example, to provide a geodescent format. So right now we are only dealing with this format, but in the future we might be able to do this with PDF format as well. And let's import it. For example, let's give a name to the strip, let's give it, let's call it portaldemo and let's create it. Here is our ship. So when we select the tools, when we select the ship, for example, you are able to displace it, you are able to rotate it and you are able to place it in the place you want to reach. For example, let's talk about this berth and you are able after that to plan route towards this burst. Now what are we doing that for? Well, for simple reasons that ships are not unsinkable and it's better if they burst on a place when they have enough depth to safely reside. Let's give you an example about this ship, for example, which is another demonstration here. As you can see, we have a ship which is safely burst nearby the quay. But here we can play with some specific aspects of the ships, including the drought. So let's take for example this value, a 10.5 value here. As you can see, based on the soundings, this will not be necessarily safe given the fact that the depth of the draught is not the same, is a little bit superior to the ones that we have in terms of sounding. So what do we do? We plan the alerts and we see what happens when we have depth which is actually shallower than the draw that we have. The purpose of this functionality is to show you that actually different soundings are actually opposing the bursting of the ship. In terms of safety, this is quite useful because if you need to actually plan your berthing, given the template of your ship, this functionality helps you to understand that you need to do that directly. So of course this is useful for our boss, this is useful for masters, this is useful for pilots, but also for hydrographers because they might need to propose and to provide another location to the ships given their drought and dimensions. So that's it. We have actually an interactive opportunity for real time data and bat symmetry data, which is one of the main strengths of Portal. We deal with an automated bathymetry which provides information about which locations and which routes are the safest for the Python. As I said, it is really hard to make an exhaustive cover of every tools and every functionality offered by Portal. But the idea in here is to actually show you what runs through the tool might provide here. The profile we are dealing with is actually quite general, therefore we have every kind of functionality that we want. But if you are pilots, you might need to focus on the functionality we just showed and the one located above the IAS and the one related to the dangers rating the ships. I know that I have the habit of talking fast and eating my words, so I just hope I didn't lose anyone yet. And since we are here, I wanted this presentation to be as interactive as possible. Therefore I am asking you, do you want to play the tool? Do you want something specific to be done with the tool currently? Please feel free to ask us. Is there an equation? I take that as a no. The idea about this presentation is also to add some additional content regarding the tool that we have right now. It is really hard to cover all the functionalities and especially all the aspects that are enabled when you have a real time instance, for example, in the harbours we are working with. Therefore, at the end of this presentation we will send the content to every people who subscribed to this webinar. The idea will be to gather every questions that you may have and if you have some specific aspects that you want to be clarified on, feel free to ask us. But right now the idea was to show you how the intents of Portal work in the Brest harbour, which was one of the harbours we're working the most closely with. And here, if we zoom out, you can see for example the differences between the harbour encs that we are providing and the official encs provided by the hydrographic services of the shop. Please let me know if you have any interrogation and hopefully I was clear enough through the point that I gave. So I don't know which is Ms. External, but could you decline your identity? Maybe he has not understand. Yes, perhaps. I think it's. Maybe it's good so far, not any question. We will send the presentation. Yes, every kind of material, presentation and documentation and brochures. The tool will be sent to the mailing list after the end of this meeting. Hopefully I didn't lose anyone and I'm just happy if people at least learn something about Portal. If you need a specific call regarding the device, you just feel free to call us and we will plan a meeting to see if it can answer your very needs. We know, for example, that some Arbos may have some specific requirements regarding the information they want to be displayed on the interface and we are used to dealing with that kind of requirement. For example, there is a French Arbo which school which asked us for display of cranes and we were able to provide this very need. So everything is possible as long as politely.
Thank you, Yann.