The port of Zeebrugge handles a whopping 50 million tons of cargo each year and employs 11,000 people. In a port of this size, there is a lot of machinery catering for the transportation of goods and cargo. One type of machinery is so-called “straddle carriers” which are used to transport cargo containers around the terminal.

As the straddle carriers move around the terminal, it can be hard for the central administration to know the status of each unit. What is the fuel consumption, the oil level, the battery voltage, how many containers is it carrying, and maybe most importantly, where is it in the terminal?

To enable the office to keep track of these things, APM wanted to install a wireless system which would enable communication between the straddle carriers and the central office. The problem was that the carriers use a CAN-based bus internally which could not communicate with the Modbus-TCP-based monitoring system that was to send the data to the office. 

The solution

APM Terminals got in contact with PICS, a Belgian system integrator focused on communication between different PLC-systems and industrial devices. These communication experts have long been working with Anybus products to solve tricky communication issues at different industrial sites around Belgium.

They quickly deemed that the Anybus Communicator CAN would be a perfect fit to handle the conversion between the CAN-based network in the 22 straddle carriers and the Modbus-TCP network. The Anybus Communicator CAN works as a translator between the CAN-bus in the straddle carrier and the Modbus TCP of the communication system, converting each telegram through built-in hardware and software. 

“We found the Anybus Communicator quite easy to use,” says Bart de Roo and Steven Lowyck, Control Engineers at APM terminals. “After a three-month test period, we had the first system in place in a straddle carrier which could be monitored from the office. A real advantage of the Anybus Communicator is that the configurations can be re-used. This means that by simply changing addresses, we can immediately apply a new Communicator in another straddle carrier.”

The configuration is made via the Anybus Configuration Manager, a Windows-based software where APM Terminals can specify exactly how telegrams should be passed on between systems.

“The implementation went quite smoothly,” says Berge Billauws, Managing Director at PICS. Installing an Anybus Communicator usually takes an hour or two and within a few days, we had the 22 carriers communicating with the central office. "What I really like about the Anybus Communicator is that it is so configurable and that you can tweak the messages as you wish. The fact that the Anybus Communicator CAN supports both 11-bit and 29-bit identifiers, was also a prerequisite for the success of the installation.”