Global ports around digital logistics and innovation @Antwerp!
The ChainPort hackathon was organized to find innovative solutions to current issues being faced by the Port of Antwerp such as port traffic congestion, connectivity between various ports & ships etc. Other companies who were co-sponsors wanted similar solutions to issues of classification of dangerous goods, data management & analysis and sustainability.
Most participants had already registered themselves as part of a team and as a result one of our challenges was to find a team. There were initially some difficulties as the individuals who were not part of a team were not willing to be open to ideas or include us in substantial parts of the design of solutions. After a few round of discussions we aligned ourselves with a few individuals experienced in data analysis, programming & management.
The solution
The solution of the team was to manage and integrate the crossing of ships into maps, displaying the data gathered by data mining and also to compare the estimated time of arrival (ETA), modeled time of arrival, and actual time of arrival. 
Our role was to collect historical weather data through an application programming interface and forecast how weather causes delays and thus calculate a more accurate ETA. We used Microsoft Visual Basic & HTML for web scrapping and created a recurring neural network to forecast the values. Meanwhile the other team members worked on structuring how our platform could add business value to the system and also the integration of the maps and data into a single interface.
Based on this a presentation was made to the organizers. It was a wonderful experience where we learned about working with individuals who we did not really know, finding compromises, sticking to time tables and of course coping with little sleep!
