Thursday 22 February, we had quite an interesting KIVI lecture from our speaker Michiel Gunsing, who is the CEO of the start up company GMBS which he started together with his CTO Joris Brouwer in 2021. The content was about how GMBS can reduce container loss, by providing hardware and software to be used on the bridge of a ship, such that a captain can be warned about potential loss of containers. Also we got a nice insight into their entrepreneurship, like the type of challenges that they had to be overcome so far. Also a real demonstration of the hardware and software during the lecture inspired the audience seen the number of questions after the lecture finished. We are looking forward to see more of this technology in the future such that the number of containers can be largely reduced.

Download the presentation

GBMS is an innovative start-up in the Maritime sector. Over the last two years, the company has developed a captains-decision support system to show the loads in container-stacks in real-time to the crew.

The incident with the MSC-ZOE, 1st of January 2017 has made clear how 342 containers spread over a natural reserve have a devastating effect the environment. Sadly this is not rare event. Every year, worldwide, over 3000 TUE containers are lost at sea.

In many cases this is due to the crew not knowing how close they are sailing to the limits, with respect to stack-loads. While sailing, the crew does not have any indication what forces are acting in the container-stacks. Besides that, before of loading, the crew has to approve the cargo plan by checking the cargo security manual (CSM). However, the CSM can ever include all possible stacking combinations. Checking is therefore very difficult without accurate and fast digital tools, which in most cases are not available.

GBMS has developed the Sensorium system. This system can calculate the rules laid down in the CSM in a fraction of a second. This has opened up the possibility to run these calculation very often and show the actual loads in the container stack in real time to the crew.

In this presentation, Dr. ir. Michiel Gunsing, founder of GBMS, will explain the system and show how this can reduce the loss of containers at sea.