- The Port of Corpus Christi is using AI and a digital replica of its port to track moving ships.
- It's also using a large language model that generates hypothetical incidents for training.
- This article is part of "How AI Is Changing Everything," a series on AI adoption across industries.
The Port of Corpus Christi in Texas is among the United States' most important seaports. It's the country's third-largest port by tonnage, and it exports more US crude oil than any other domestic port. 2024 was a record year, with the port recording more than 200 million tons of shipments, 130 million of which were crude oil.
Coordinating a port of this size is a huge logistical undertaking. To manage this challenge, the port commissioned the development of an AI-enhanced command-and-control software called the Overall Port Tactical Information System, or OPTICS.
OPTICS is built on the Unity 3D engine, which creates a 3D digital twin — a virtual replica — of the port using real-world data. That real-world data is managed by Esri's ArcGIS, which can handle the large amounts of current and historical data needed to make this project possible. The result looks a bit like Google Earth but shows up-to-date information on the port's operations.
"In the acronym OPTICS, tactical is meant in the sense of making smart business decisions informed by real-time information," Darrell Keach, the business systems manager at the Port of Corpus Christi, told Business Insider. "So, that's what we built."
Tracking ships with machine learning
All large commercial vessels have a transponder that broadcasts the vessel's identification, course, speed, and destination, among other information.
But it isn't a real-time system — ships report their position intermittently every few seconds or minutes.
"The frequency of updates we get from a transponder varies on a couple of factors," said Starr Long, the executive producer at The Acceleration Agency, which developed OPTICS for the Port of Corpus Christi. "When ships are at rest, we get updates about every four minutes. When they're moving, we can get updates about every two minutes."
Long said gaps could be worsened by a switch between tracking systems. Ships outside radio communications relay tracking data over satellite but then switch to radio as they come into port. The transition can extend the interval between updates to about six minutes.
Such gaps were incompatible with OPTICS' goal of creating a real-time overview of port operations. The digital replica wouldn't be very realistic if the virtual ships seemed to teleport between positions.
The Acceleration Agency used machine learning to help solve this problem. Unlike traditional vessel tracking systems, which may appear to show ships skipping between update points, OPTICS uses an AI model — trained on about a year of ship movement data from the Port of Corpus Christi — to predict a ship's position. This allows a smoother, more realistic view of port operations at any given moment.
Keach emphasized the safety implications of this improvement. Larger ships are "almost a thousand feet long, a hundred feet wide, and full of very flammable liquid," he said. "The margins are fairly narrow, so having as much data as possible for navigation is important."
The Port of Corpus Christi also has ambitious plans for how this system could expand its scope. Keach said OPTICS' next development cycle would hopefully include vessel-crossing predictions that could anticipate and prevent collisions.
Generative AI for emergency response training
Many of the ships entering and exiting the Port of Corpus Christi carry hazardous cargo, but the port's infrastructure also has risks. In 2020, a dredging vessel operating in the port struck a liquid propane pipeline, causing a deadly explosion.
The Port of Corpus Christi conducts emergency response exercises to prepare for events like this. As part of the deployment of OPTICS, the port wanted to create hypothetical events based on past incidents for training purposes.
But this feature could conflict with federal security requirements if it were to reproduce past events with protected criminal justice information.
To solve for that, The Acceleration Agency trained a large language model capable of generating situations that are similar to — but not exact reproductions of — real incidents.
"What we did was take basically a year's worth of actual security incidents from the police department, like chemical spills, trespassing, vehicle collisions, and trained an LLM to generate synthetic events based on that history," Long explained.
The use of AI-generated events, rather than real-life past events, offered another benefit that became clear during development and testing. Initially, the OPTICS software generated trainings that, in some ways, were too realistic. They presented trainees with a historically accurate ratio of noncritical to urgent scenarios — as a result, those trainings addressed fewer emergency incidents, which are relatively uncommon. So Long's team had OPTICS increase the frequency of emergency events.
"We had to go back and tell it: 'No, don't do it for real. Do it much faster,'" Long said. The use of an LLM, which can process requests in natural language, simplified the creation and modification of the hypothetical events used for training.
The future of port operations
Keach said the Port of Corpus Christi's deployment of OPTICS, which started rolling out at the end of 2024, was just the start.
He said the port's investment in OPTICS was happening alongside other infrastructure investments, such as weather sensors, cameras, and a private 5G network to serve port operations.
OPTICS, which is used only by workers coordinating port traffic, might eventually aid the crews of ships coming into the port, Keach said. He added that OPTICS, equipment using augmented and virtual reality, high-tech sensors, and predictive AI could help ships navigate tough weather conditions, such as fog.
Since the port uses third-party tools — Esri's ArcGIS platform and Unity's 3D engine — as the basis of its digital twin, deploying those applications would probably be less strenuous than if it used proprietary tech. These technologies provide the flexibility to add additional data and incorporate additional devices. Unity, for instance, already supports a range of devices, including smartphones and AR headsets.
"The future state will drive it more into the field," said Keach.
