When a vessel plows into a berth at a port near Ho Chi Minh City, the damage is done. But the questions start immediately: What happened? Why? How do we prevent it?
Most operators would piece together the story from scattered camera feeds and crew reports. However, Portcoast had a fully realized digital twin of the port complete with bathymetric data, drone-captured reality models, and live vessel tracking all in one platform.
“We were able to basically simulate, with the captured footage, the lead-up leading to that accident,” says Khoi Tran, an AI and computer science specialist at Portcoast. The simulation gave stakeholders a clear picture of what went wrong and how to keep it from happening again.
It’s a stark illustration of what digital twins can do when they’re more than just a 3D model, and it’s precisely the kind of outcome Portcoast is delivering across Vietnam’s port sector.
A Natural Extension of Engineering
Portcoast isn’t a tech startup that wandered into the maritime industry. The company has deep roots as a design and engineering firm serving ports, waterways, dams, and offshore structures. They handle everything from surveying and feasibility studies to design, engineering, and construction supervision.
“So with the focus on digital twin, it’s basically a natural extension of that desire to cover the entire built asset lifecycle,” Tran explains.
That pedigree gives them a critical edge: mastery of reality capture. The company deploys drones, laser scanners, lidar, and unmanned surface vessels to capture the existing condition of ports and their surroundings. When that geospatial data is layered with live operational feeds of vessel positions, IoT sensors, and camera systems, the result is a digital twin with depth that off-the-shelf platforms can’t match.
Designing a Grain Port Before Breaking Ground
At a grain port in Vung Tau, Vietnam—a facility handling corn, beans, and soy imported from overseas—operators were building a new warehouse. The challenge: designing a conveyor belt system that would automatically transport grain from vessels into the warehouse, optimized around the port’s berth operations and existing infrastructure.
Portcoast loaded the BIM model into the digital twin and simulated every conceivable way the grain could flow from vessel to warehouse, accounting for berth operations, existing infrastructure, and physical site constraints.
“We were able to put the BIM model in the digital twin and simulate all the different ways that you can have this sort of flow of the product into the warehouse,” Tran explains. “They were able to really optimize and pick out the optimal solution before they actually implement that sort of thing in the actual port.”
The port didn’t just build the conveyor system; it built the right one, chosen from a field of simulated alternatives, before construction ever began.
The Power of a Single Source of Truth
Both examples share a common thread: the value of bringing disparate data streams into one place. BIM models, geospatial context, live sensors, and historical records are all visible together in real time.
“Just having that single source of truth where you can put all these different kinds of data together from the BIM model, the geospatial context, the different devices and sensors, and all these live sources of information, just having it all in one place, real time, you can see how they relate to each other,” Tran says. “That already gives the stakeholders a lot of awareness, a lot of understanding compared to the usual siloed information.”
Planning the Next 100 Years
Portcoast is also helping Vietnam’s central government plan mega-port development in the Cai Mep–Thi Vai region over 50- to 100-year horizons. The team captures existing conditions, including the natural landscapes of the Mekong Delta, and models what new developments would look like and how they’d interact with what’s already there. Environmental data, underwater surveys, and years of studies all feed into a single ArcGIS platform.
“We can present these findings to the government before they do any sort of planning for the next 50, 100 years,” Tran says. “That would have a giant impact in terms of how they can make the best decision.”
The Road Ahead
For all the promise, Tran is candid about the hurdles. The biggest challenge isn’t the flashy technology; it’s the foundation. “How can you ensure the data that you have, the foundational stuff that makes up your digital twin—the reality data, the operational data, all these live data—how to ensure that they’re accurate and sufficient is still a huge challenge in and of itself,” he says.
AI is helping Portcoast keep up with the massive volume of survey data of point clouds, photos, meshes, and DTMs that sometimes cover entire cities or provinces. “Using the AI tools—some developed by Esri, some further developed by ourselves to fit the Vietnamese context—we are able to more efficiently process all of that,” Tran says.
Looking ahead, he sees AI analyzing the operational data streaming off digital twins as the next frontier and a “huge game changer” for port owners and operators. The approach also isn’t limited to ports. “You can apply the same concept from the port to any other infrastructure or any built asset project,” he says. “You can achieve the same kind of benefits when you apply these digitalization technologies.”
For Portcoast, the vessel-crash simulation and the grain-conveyor optimization are just the beginning. The real ambition is a future where every major infrastructure decision from a single conveyor belt to a 100-year mega-port plan is informed by a living, data-rich digital twin.
