The Port Congestion Dashboard is a powerful feature of the Portcast platform. It gives you one live, interactive view of congestion at ports around the world — so you can see where vessels are waiting, how long they are being held up, and which hubs are getting worse, and act on it before it affects your shipments.
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What's new: The Port Congestion Dashboard has been fully rebuilt as a native Portcast experience — faster and more interactive than the previous version. It adds a 3D globe view, a "Most Congested Ports" ranking, a "Recent Shifts" tracker, side-by-side port comparison, and a redesigned per-port deep-dive. The underlying metrics are the same as before; the way you explore them has changed.
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Port congestion refers to a situation where vessels experience delays at a port due to limited capacity, inefficiencies, or disruptions in operations. This has a direct impact on the shipments being transported.
In order to learn more about what constitutes congestion and how it is measured, refer to our “Understanding Port Congestion” knowledge base article.
Because congestion can only be understood over time, most views in the dashboard are based on the most recent week by default, and let you change the date range to focus on earlier periods.
Every view and ranking in the dashboard is built from the same handful of metrics. It helps to know them before you start:
Weekly metrics are the best representation of port congestion; they are robust metrics that capture port traffic across a full week. This is required since many vessels’ waiting spans multiple days at specific ports - daily metrics would be limited in representing congestion in these cases.
Both weekly metrics are represented through two metrics: the median consitutes the average time vessels had to wait or dwell at the port; additionally, we also include an “Outlier” metric which is the 90-percentile for each metric. This metric represents the time the ‘worst offenders’ had to wait or dwell, displaying the worst case scenarios for the port (as variation is possible, depending on terminal or other factors).
Example of a weekly waiting time chart showing the two key dimensions: average (median across all vessels that waited at port) and outliers (the 90th percentile, or 10% of vessels that were affected by worst-case waiting times). The same type of visualization is displayed for dwell times in-app.
In the new dashboard, we combine both weekly metrics to establish a turnaround visualization, meant to convey the evolution of time vessels are typically experiencing at port, both in the waiting and dwell phases.
An example of combining weekly dwell and waiting times to convey the typical turnaround time at port for a give week.
Daily metrics are less robust than weekly metrics but can give important views into traffic volumes (throughput or backlog) at port, as well as leading indicators of congestion.