Digital twin helps Texas port track operations, plan ahead

Texas’ Port of Corpus Christi is using a digital twin to bring together multiple datasets to better monitor and anticipate security conditions.

Called the Overall Port Tactical Information Computer System, known as OPTICS, the solution combines geographic information system, 3D gaming, computer-aided dispatch and weather technologies to provide a “single pane of glass” and source of truth for all law enforcement and port authorities involved in monitoring the port.

“We knew we needed some way to bring all of this information together,” said Darrell Keach, business systems manager at the port, the third largest in the country by tonnage. “Integrating them all into this digital twin and then on a 3D stage with a game technology … so far, it’s working really well.”

Officials can use OPTICS to monitor the port in several ways: real time, near real time — about a two-minute delay — and future state. It was built by The Acceleration Agency, a partner of mapping software company Esri, that specializes in using the Unity game engine and the ArcGIS Maps Software Development Kit for Unity.

Because the imagery is 3D, “without clicking on anything, you can see that there’s other ships in the area that are oil tankers or barges or tugboats,” Keach said. “You have relative size between them, because the icons and the renders are drawn to size” using information from the Automatic Identification System, which transmits and receives information about ships in real time.

That allows for better situational awareness, he said, because authorities can click on a vessel to get the data it’s transmitting about its location as it navigates the port, assessing, say, whether a ship approaching the channel’s narrowest point can fit by other ships docked nearby.

Similarly, if there is a collision or oil spill, for example, “I immediately know that this vessel is within 1,000 feet of where this incident is happening,” Keach said. “I could find any information if I needed to contact that vessel and see what their call sign is to call in over the radio as well…. [We’re] using machine learning that’s tied back to the gaming technology to do predictive analytics of where these vessels are moving.”

Additionally, the port included buildings in OPTICS to allow for scenario planning with law enforcement. “God forbid you had an active shooter in one of those facilities, [OPTICS can show] what can they see from those locations, what can they not see,” Keach said. “There’s a lot of different use cases for this software, other than just watching assets move around.”

What’s more, the model lets officials see the port in a future state. For instance, a bridge crossing one of the channels is under construction, but in OPTICS, they can see how the completed version would affect vessel and vehicle traffic. “It can even jump onto that bridge to see what can somebody on the bridge now see down in the harbor,” Keach added.

Without the digital twin, officials had to jump around among applications to get the information they needed, which was time-consuming, especially in time-sensitive emergencies, he said.

“In the past, [it was] often people back in an office that are having to relay that information out to people in the field, either through screenshots, email, radios, cell phones, and multiple times over and over, because some of those modes of communication are one-to-one. It’s not one-to-many,” Keach said.

A key to building out OPTICS was having Esri ArcGIS in place, said Rex Hansen, a principal product manager for ArcGIS Maps Software Development Kit for Game Engines at Esri.

“We’ve built the ArcGIS Maps SDK for Unity as a plugin to Unity,” Hansen said. “The idea here is that it can reduce the abstraction required by folks that are affiliated with or working for the port, so you don’t have to translate between a flat 3D map or a paper map into reality.”

It provides a vision of what the port looks like in real time, in the past or in the future, and it lets users get intelligence about that information, he added. “All these data layers could be used by different audiences, different roles, but the idea is, we want to bring it all together, so they all speak the same language, they’re all in the same coordinate space, and they’re all accurately represented in geographic space,” Hansen said.

Using funding from a Federal Emergency Management Agency Port Security grant, the port stood OPTICS up in August 2024, after just nine months of work. But the capabilities are only the first of two phases, Keach said. The port will use a second round of grant funding to build a direct integration with GeoPORT, its Esri enterprise geodatabase, Samsara vehicle telemetry systems, and expand the current machine learning implementation into predict vessel crossing points.

Another future capability in the works is incorporating bathymetric data, or water depth measurements, to get visibility above and below the waterline.

Other ports interested in mimicking Corpus Christi’s are in luck, Keach added. OPTICS was built with replication in mind.

“It’s built with [application programming interfaces] and connectors so that any other port or city or county that is an Esri customer could take this product, connect it to whatever software they're using, and bring in their Esri system and do something like this without having to start from scratch,” he said.