KAUST Researcher Says AI Berth Planning Offers Saudi Ports the Quickest Gains

The question is becoming more pressing as volumes rise. Ports run by the Saudi Ports Authority, known as Mawani, handled 8.3 million twenty-foot equivalent units in 2025, up 10.58% from 2024. When several vessels arrive at once, ships wait offshore, cranes are double-booked, yards fill up and trucks queue at the gates, and a delay in one place spreads through the supply chain.

Park told Arab News that the biggest gains lie in the linked decisions planners make every day: which ship goes to which berth, in what order, which cranes serve it and where containers are stacked. He described these as combinatorial optimisation problems, noting that just 20 ships competing for berths can be sequenced in about 2.4 quintillion ways, before cranes, storage or trucks are considered.

He sees two routes. Machine learning can use existing port data, including the Automatic Identification System signals that track ships' positions and speeds, to forecast arrivals, handling times and congestion. Reinforcement learning can test strategies in realistic port simulations and learn which decisions cut waiting times. In one scenario he described, a model flags on Sunday that a ship will arrive about 10 hours early on Tuesday, giving planners time to move it to another berth or ask it to slow down. "The planner still makes the call, but now with two days' notice and a clear picture of the consequences," he said.

Park said AI cannot replace the unwritten safety knowledge of experienced staff, such as which hazardous cargoes should not berth side by side, and that such rules must stay fixed constraints with humans making final decisions. He said ports should judge results on offshore waiting times, turnaround, crane productivity, safety incidents and how often staff override the system's recommendations, and warned that the approach needs reliable data, simulations and substantial computing power.

Mawani signed a memorandum of understanding with the Hamburg Port Authority and Hamburg Port Consulting in 2024 covering digital transformation and automation, including AI. Mawani and Saudi Global Ports did not respond to Arab News' requests for comment on how they currently use AI.