Green RoRo Shipping through Digital Innovation

RORO Green enables Denmark to gain global leadership in digital and sustainable Roll-on Rolloff (RoRo) shipping. The project has been set up to realize a clear vision for how Europe’s largest Ferry Operator, DFDS can digitalize their stowage and loading operations as a way to gain
further terminal efficiencies, gain fuel consumption savings and emission reductions for their fleet. The project is innovative, and is expected to transform the industry beyond what is current state today. In today’s RoRo shipping, source data on cargo units (position, weight, dimensions,
ID etc.) are not sufficiently digitalized, and existing IT solutions used for forecasting and planning terminal operations, vessel stowage and loading / discharge of cargo units are simple, disintegrated and most work processes are very manual.


Aim of the project is to digitalize, automate and optimize the end2end process of cargo stowage and operations for RoRo ships at port. The project scope is therefore research and development as well as integration work and testing of a broad range of relevant digital technologies for selected DFDS terminals and routes:

  1. Digital data capture (via drones, mobile robots, machine vision, sensors etc.) to track
    cargo units (position, condition, dimensions, weight, id etc.) at terminals and on board
    vessels
  2. Data storage and integration and exchange of data sets (cloud solutions, APIs etc.)
    across IT applications of terminals, ports, ships, cargo haulage companies etc.
  3. OR / AI / Machine Learning methods to enable optimization of stowage and loading /
    discharge processes under uncertainty
  4. IT / Decision support tools for end users responsible for planning and executing vessel
    stowage and cargo operations
  5. Business Intelligence solutions and Dashboards to monitor and track asset utilization and
    emissions on a real time basis for terminal and cargo operations, as well as to enable
    evaluation of economic and sustainability returns from investments in digital and other
    decarbonisation technologies