By CenSoF’s Moving Domain Team and Nicholas Ward, Funding and Partnership Development Executive, Port of Dover
In October 2024 the European Union (EU) plans to implement its Entry/Exit System (EES). The world’s richest countries are moving away from physical passports and visas, and towards a fully digital record of immigration status and history. EES is part of this strategy but, without an upstream technological solution, challenges have been raised as to how this will be carried out in practice by the EU in a way that does not impede the vital flow of people and goods on Kent’s motorways? And how is the Port managing the traffic already flowing into Dover?
CenSoF’s Moving Domain team travelled to Dover to find out more. We heard from Port officials about a £45 million infrastructure programme and really ambitious plans to harness cutting edge digital technologies to streamline the whole logistics corridor.
The Port of Dover’s appeal as the shortest connection with mainland Europe funnels no fewer than eleven million passengers and £144 billion of vital trade every year. It does so through a ferry terminal that is home, due to the juxtaposed controls that exist as a result of the Anglo-French Treaty of Le Touquet, to the French/EU international border inside the port.
During our trip we visited Terminal Control to understand how the Port keeps things moving. On the sixth floor, three staff surrounded by monitors, radios and telephones overlook traffic entering and leaving the Eastern Docks, and vehicles waiting to board ferries. Camera feeds display traffic inside the port including on the approaches to French border controls and ferry ticket booths. Based on extensive experience the controllers can react swiftly to developing operational situations and take pre-emptive action to mitigate congestion. As well as requesting support from the ferry operators and border teams, controllers can ask Kent Police and Highways England to implement the Dover Traffic Access Protocol (TAP). This initiative holds trucks away from the port and town centre by creating a temporary rolling queue on one inbound lane of the A20 west of Dover. Vehicles from the TAP are only released when space in the Port becomes available.
It is against this background the EU will introduce EES as a mechanism for tracking non-EU nationals in to and out of the bloc. Instead of a border guard manually checking records, verifying identity, and issuing a passport stamp, EES will create and then verify a digital file including fingerprints and facial biometrics held in the system’s database. The EU claims that this system will make border crossing faster and easier for ‘legitimate travellers’ while identifying over-stayers. In the interim, however, British travellers to Europe will first need to be registered on the system – submitting fingerprints and photographs in view of an EU border official at the point of embarkation. At this point each passenger will spend additional time being processed. This is the action – multiplied on peak holiday dates by up to 10,000 tourist vehicles and their passengers – that could have important implications for traffic fluidity.
Transforming port operations
Traffic accidents, adverse weather in the Short Straits, or other challenges may be unpredictable but research initiatives at the Port now provide a dynamic alternative to the more conventional methods of dealing with traffic build up.
Linear solutions that rely on the exponential increase in vehicle holding zones are economically disruptive and geographically impractical in a port where space is constrained both by the White Cliffs and the Channel itself.
Instead, the solution is to transition from infrastructure–enabled traffic management to dynamic, technologically-driven operations. In effect, Dover will harness data from every aspect of port operating conditions to reduce complex, apparently random events into a series of complementary digital twins delivering real-time recommendations for predicting potential issues and facilitating streamlined traffic flows.
In the screens in the control room for example, we saw images captured from ANPR cameras across the strategic road network (the M20 and M2/A2) by machine-learning micro-twins. This static data is reinterpreted to predict traffic converging on Dover in 15-minute segments, 24 hours per day up to 15 days in advance. Real-time events such as accidents or the closure of the Dartford Crossing are immediately incorporated and traffic predictions automatically updated. Fractional data chain analysis within the over-arching orchestration framework also ensures that traffic coordinators at the port can not only identify vehicles destined for the ferry terminals but also differentiate between trucks, coaches and cars.
The Port plans to extend the system to monitor real-time traffic flows to and through border control as well as processing times at passenger check-in points. Subsequent modelling will draw on reinforcement and federated learning (we were excited to learn more about the latter in the recent visit to Bristol’s SMART Internet Lab) to deliver predictive, constantly refreshed traffic analysis against future lane, control point and check in processing rates. Ultimately, the predictive capacity of the model will expand to include the complete range of operational factors including staffing rotas, ferry sailing timetables and maintenance schedules.
These developments represent a conceptual step-change in the Port’s operational capabilities and have only become possible through successful collaborations with leading research institutions including the University of Manchester, the Digital and Connected Places Catapults, and, we hope in the future, the University of Bristol. The complexity and scale of these multi-dimensional solutions will demand significant investment in IT infrastructure – including the incorporation of high-speed quantum computing. However, IT infrastructure alone is not enough and there is a fundamental requirement to develop a specialist skilled workforce with the expertise to deliver both operational maintenance and continuing systems development. And it’s here that the Port’s search for the workforce of the future envisions revitalising towns like Dover where there are significant clusters of multiple deprivation.
The Port of Dover anticipates collaboration with Government will reinforce the strategically vital trade corridor to Europe whilst simultaneously accelerating the skills essential to both Dover’s socio-economic regeneration and the UK’s technological future.
For the Moving Domain team, transformation at the Port of Dover presents a unique opportunity to investigate the sociodigital futures of mobility. The UK Border Strategy 2025 has the ambitious aim to use digital technology and upskilling to produce ‘the world’s most effective border’. The Port of Dover is where the rubber hits the road both literally and metaphorically.
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