ZPMC supplies PSA Singapore with AGVs made in Malaysia

Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries (ZPMC) will supply Tuas Port with Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) manufactured in Malaysia. The machines are part of an order of 46 AGVs PSA Singapore has placed with ZPMC for Tuas Port, its new fully automated terminal being developed in Singapore.

Producing container handling equipment outside of China is something new for ZPMC. The AGVs were manufactured in Malaysia, which ZPMC described as a “pilot project for ZPMC’s allocation of overseas production resources”, led by the ZPMC Asia Regional Centre in Malaysia.

“The experience gained from this project also provides valuable lessons for future overseas production efforts, enhancing ZPMC’s position in overseas material handling equipment projects,” ZPMC said.

Durapower battery

As can be seen from the picture, the new ZPMC AGV has a battery from Durapower. In late 2023 Durapower Holdings Pte Ltd won a contract for AGVs from PSA Singapore with its ZPMC 266 kWh Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) and this will be used across the company’s different brand AGVs.

There are now 200 AGVs of different brands operating at Tuas Port. To manage all the work instructions PSA Singapore has implemented an “event-driven architecture” from Solace, a middleware software specialist based in Ontario, Canada.

Event drive architecture describes a software environment where decoupled applications can publish and subscribe to events using a middleware layer called an event broker. At Tuas Port that broker is the Solace PubSub+ application, which is designed to provide timely and reliable event delivery at scale.