Leveraging 5G to Enable Automated Barge Control: 5G-Blueprint Perspectives and Insights

The shipping sector has become one of the corner-stone aspects of modern production systems, which has been impacting economic growth over the past decades. Its digitalization is expected to make significant improvements in ship control safety and reliability by enabling autonomous operations. Nonetheless, there are still many challenges that need to be thoroughly studied, and in this paper, we focus on one of them, i.e., the communication between barges, ports, and services, as the increased network latency and the limitations on the bandwidth imposed by satellite communications could result in significant risks for accident occurrence. Thus, we present one of the first attempts to leverage the potential of 5G systems for automating barge operations, starting from teleoperation as an enabler of automation, toward creating and validating a cellular-based automated barge control system in a real-life environment.