Feature Eyes in the Sky W hen Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces pum- melled the Port of Odessa, Ukraine’s largest seaport, earlier this year, it was forced to shut down. Its annual traffic capacity of 40 mil- lion tonnes, roughly the same as that of the Port of Montreal, was suddenly out of commission. Cargo ships stayed away. The nearest large ship to that port in mid-May was the Maran Excellence, a bulk carrier flying the flag of Malta, docked at the nearby and also-closed Port of Yuzhny. On the MarineTraffic.com website, an open, community-based project which provides real-time information on the movements of ships and their current lo- cations in harbours and ports, the Maran Excellence was clearly visible. Its vessel details were there for anyone to see. In its quest to provide up-to-date in- formation about ship movements, MarineTraffic uses an automatic iden- tification system (AIS) that works with transceivers on ships and is used by vessel traffic services. But, sometimes, that’s not enough. And that’s when satellite imaging is used to get the missing pieces of infor- mation to figure out where the ships are. Despite the sci-fi fare offered by Hollywood, satellite images rarely – as of now – offer up high-enough resolution images to detect things as small as pirate 12 • SUPPLYCHAINCANADA.CA How Satellites Will Transform Supply Chains By James Risdon ships or other small boats. Satellite im- ages are, however, almost always more than good enough to spot bigger vessels that are trying to escape unnoticed. “It is enough to detect bigger vessels that have switched off their transponder,” says MarineTraffic’s Nikos Pothitakis. “Tankers and cargo vessels can be de- tected even by using free satellite imagery provided by European Space Agency satellites. This is interesting, since some- times tankers and cargo vessels might intentionally switch off their transponders (for example, due to sanctions), so the vessel traffic density in some areas moni- tored only by AIS is under-estimated.” Satellite images are used by MarineTraffic as an add-on source of data to what it gets from AIS to get a better picture of what’s going on. Airline travel and freight are tracked by FlightAware, a digital aviation company that provides similar real-time flight-track- ing information of more than 10,000 aircraft operators and service providers. Satellite imagery, though, is so far be- ing used primarily as an added source of information to track the movements of goods. That’s partly because these are static images only available to com- panies hours after they have been taken. It’s not real-time data. “Satellite data cannot be used for re- al-time applications as the most recent images that we can acquire for an area were acquired at least several hours ago. I guess this would be a major is- sue for a supply chain use case, as such disruptions could be potentially detected with significant latency and certainly not in real-time,” says Pothitakis. Andre Cire, associate professor of op- erations management at the University of Toronto, says the technology which currently makes use of satellite imagery is still in its infancy. “A lot of companies are using it for virtue signalling simply because it has an environmentally friendly aspect to it, but it does have its beneficial aspects,” says Cire. “There is value. In some cas- es, it can be beneficial.” Satellite imaging technology is particu- larly useful in the agricultural and forestry sectors to determine the health of crops and more effectively use fertilizers and other products to maximize yields. “For the food supply chain, they can use satellite images for the processing of the products and see how this year’s crop compares to the product in other years,” says Guoqing Zhang, a professor at the Supply Chain Management and Logistics Optimization Research Centre of the University of Windsor. “With that information, you can deter- mine that this product is good, that the quality is good, and you can order more.” Supply chain managers can in some cases use information from satellite © Gorodenkoff / shutterstock.com
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