The Port Congestion dashboard is a powerful feature of the Portcast platform. It allows you to visualize measured port indices that can help you understand activity and congestion on global ports across the world.

What constitutes Port Congestion?

Port congestion refers to a situation where vessels experience delays at a port due to limited capacity, inefficiencies, or disruptions in operations. This has direct impact on the transported shipments.

In order to learn more about what constitutes congestion and how to measure it, refer to our “Understanding Port Congestion” knowledge base article.

What features are included in Portcast’s Port Congestion dashboard?

The Port Congestion dashboard includes per-port metrics and features that are visualized in different ways, in order to give you a comprehensive insight into what is going on in a specific port:

Vessel Waiting Time (in days) World Ports Map

The first feature in the dashboard is a global view of ports around the world, displayed on a map, and symbolized as follows:

• the size of the circle is based on the Total Vessels Berthed (weekly) metric. This is an indication of the volume of traffic going through the port.
• the color of the circle is based on the Vessel Waiting Time (in days) metric. This is an indication of the time it takes a vessel to berth on the port, and is an important metric in understanding delays:
  • Dark green means a vessel waiting time of less than a day;
  • Light green means a vessel waiting time of 1 to 2 days
  • Yellow means a vessel waiting time of 2 to 3 days
  • Red means a vessel waiting time of more than 3 days

By definition, port congestion can only be defined and measured in a time continuum, where certain metrics vary depending on disruptions or normal operation. By default, the port congestion dashboard will show data based on the last week (total vessels being an absolute amount, and waiting time being an average). You can change the period for the desired weekly range date to understand and focus on previous periods.

You can zoom in on the map and hover onto a specific port’s information and metrics.

Daily vessel traffic at port chart

The second block of visualizations on the Port Congestion dashboard is a line chart including two data series:

• In orange, the total amount of vessels waiting on a particular day is displayed