By: Benjie Wells
BLOG: How many OCR portals do I need in an Automated Gate?
Vehicle speeds up to 50km per hour. Processing time of less than 3 seconds per passages. The Gate OCR Portal has quite an impressive performance. But how many of these powerhouses do you need to make your Automated Gate as efficient as possible?
Since every Gate OCR Portal has a theoretical capacity of over 250 trucks per hour, is seems an easy calculation. However, the truck volume is not the best counsel for the amount of portals to deploy at your container terminal; The gate design is. In this blog we describe the different scenario’s.
One to Many
If your gate layout allows so, the OCR portals should be positioned as early in the process as possible. In that case, one portal can serve multiple Gate Lanes. We call this scenario one to many (1:N). If the layout allows to place the OCR portals away from the gate lanes, then the recommended quantity depends on the truck volume, but very common is the quantity of 2 or 3 for deepsea terminals, where is a single unit can work for smaller facilities.
In the Gate Lanes
Sometimes the design does not allow to place the portal away from the gate lanes. In this case the portals can be deployed within the Gate Lanes (1:1). This means every gate lane has its own OCR portal, in other words the number of OCR portals equals the number of Gate Lanes.
Also something to consider; for bigger container terminals with truck peaks over 100 trucks per hour, we recommend to deploy at least 2 portals in each direction for redundancy matters. Should one portal be blocked for whatever reason, your gate process can still continue.
What about your gate layout?
Curious how many OCR portals are needed at your container terminal? With the right design we can make your gate process most efficient. We would love to tell you how!
About the CERTUS OCR Portal
As traffic at ports and terminals is increasing every year, efficient operations at the gate are necessary. A Gate OCR Portal is part of the CERTUS AutoGate solution and contributes to these efficient gate operations. As the cameras of the OCR portal capture every detail of the truck and cargo that passes by, terminals benefit not only from more accurate data, but this data is also automatically available in the Terminal Operating System. Meaning Gate clerks can perform inspections from a safe and secure office environment.