• The second prizes went to “AlRates Technologies” and “ChainGO Freight”.

• This international event posed 4 challenges, formulated by the Port Authority of Valencia, Cosco Shipping Lines Spain, Grupo Romeu and the Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation.

• The main prize of 3,000 euros was awarded by the Juan Arizo Serrulla Foundation (FJAS), and the second prizes of 1,000 euros were awarded by the Propeller Valencia association and the ALICE technology platform.

Valencia – 30.11.2020. Last Friday the final demos and the awards ceremony of the Valenciaport Hackathon took place, an international event organised by Fundación Valenciaport within the framework of the H2020 COREALIS project under the slogan “Innovating and transforming to achieve the smart, green and resilient port of the future” whose objective was to obtain innovative solutions to improve the performance and sustainability of the Port of Valencia.

During the event, the 8 finalists had the opportunity to present their projects to the hackathon jury and to the public who followed the live broadcast of the event via Youtube. Afterwards, the jury retired to deliberate off-screen and after an arduous debate announced the three winning teams.

The main prize, a cash award of 3,000 euros granted by the Juan Arizo Serrulla Foundation, was given to the project “Book a Slot” which presented a solution to the challenge formulated by COSCO Shipping Lines Spain. “Book a Slot” is a solution that optimizes the road transport delivery/pick-up operations of containers by match-making for double operations. To this end the solutions steers trucks off-peak through different incentives such as priority in queues, allocation of slots in peak times if they arrive on time and providing reliable predictions of the duration of loading/unloading operations at the port thanks to the use of data based machine learning techniques.

The second prizes, 1,000 euros in cash contributed by the Propeller Valencia association and by the ALICE technology platform, were won by the “AlRates Technologies” and “ChainGO Freight” teams, which each submitted proposals to the challenges of the Romeu Group and the Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation, respectively. The “AI Rates” solution is an intelligent platform that assists freight forwarders in processing data in unstructured tables containing the shipping companies’ rates. The solution has an AI-driven tool that combines accurate extraction, precise loading and intelligent transformation of raw data into the format required by customers. The integration of data from multiple sources is guaranteed by the application of AI algorithms along with user interaction. The ChainGO Freight solution is an online collaboration platform based on blockchain that brings transparency, visibility, security and simplicity to international trade. ChainGo offers visibility in the international transport of goods and electronic signature procedures (eSignatures) and, in particular for this Hackathon, they have added the functionality of ePayments using cryptocurrency in a simple and accessible way for all parties involved.

The Valenciaport Hackathon has been supported and sponsored by the Port Authority of Valencia, Cosco Shipping Lines Spain, Grupo Romeu and the Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation who have also proposed the 4 challenges to be solved in this hackathon and which were related to the circular economy in ports; the optimization of road transport operations; the improvement of the processing of ocean rates and the facilitation of international trade for port operations, respectively.

During an entire week, participants developed innovative solutions in response to the challenges posed, with the advice and support of expert mentors in ports and foreign trade from the sponsoring entities and Fundación Valenciaport.

The organisation of the Hackathon also points out that the idea is to give continuity to the most interesting solutions and to support them in the presentation of proposals to the Ports4.0 Fund. With this objective, a meeting will be held soon in which organisers, sponsors and mentors will comment on which solution or solutions could have continuity.

Jury

The Valenciaport Hackathon jury was made up of Albert Oñate, General Manager of COSCO Shipping Lines Spain; Juan Enrique Yxart, General Manager of SAICE and Director of Transversal Projects of the Romeu Group; William Petty, Deputy Director of the Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation; Salvador Furió, Director of Innovation and Development of the Valenciaport Foundation Cluster, and Juan Manuel Díez, Head of Strategic Planning and Innovation of the Port Authority of Valencia.