PortCrane Intelligence Platform

Overview

PortCrane is a multi-tenant SaaS platform that gives port and heavy-industry operators a single, live view of their entire crane fleet. It streams telemetry from every asset, scores operators on productivity and safety, surfaces AI-driven fatigue events, and manages the full safety, maintenance and alerting lifecycle.

The system is built around an event-driven core: a FastAPI backend ingests and broadcasts telemetry over WebSockets fanned out through Redis pub/sub, time-series data lands in a TimescaleDB hypertable, and a Next.js 15 dashboard renders live KPIs, gauges and trends with no page refresh.

Because real crane hardware is rarely available during development, the platform ships a built-in simulation engine that continuously generates realistic telemetry, alerts, fatigue and activity events. Integrating real hardware later is a matter of replacing the simulator's producers with PLC/telemetry adapters and camera-analytics feeds — the API, schema and realtime layers stay unchanged.

The problem

Crane fleets are monitored manually and reactively — operators lack real-time visibility into utilization, safety incidents are caught after the fact, and maintenance is schedule-blind. There was also no hardware available to build against during development.

Discovery

Mapped the operating model down to organizations → sites → cranes → operators, and the data each role (super admin, org admin, site manager, supervisor, operator, viewer) actually needs to act on in real time.

The solution

Built an event-driven, multi-tenant platform: FastAPI ingests telemetry and broadcasts it over WebSockets via Redis pub/sub, time-series data is stored in a TimescaleDB hypertable, and a Next.js 15 dashboard renders live KPIs, safety scoring, AI fatigue events and maintenance — all behind 6-role RBAC.

Technical stack

System architecture

1. 1

   Next.js 15 (App Router) frontend ↔ FastAPI backend over REST + WebSockets, with TanStack Query for data and Zustand for client state

2. 2

   PostgreSQL for domain data + a TimescaleDB hypertable purpose-built for high-frequency telemetry

3. 3

   Redis as cache, session store and the pub/sub event bus for realtime fan-out

4. 4

   FastAPI WebSocket connection manager ⟷ Redis pub/sub broadcasts live telemetry/alerts/activity to every connected client

5. 5

   Simulation engine (asyncio background tasks) generates realistic telemetry, alerts, fatigue and activity — swappable for real PLC/camera adapters with no API change

6. 6

   Docker Compose orchestrates 5 services with Alembic migrations and seeded demo data

Engineering challenges

Core features

• Multi-tenant organizations → sites → cranes → operators with data isolation
• JWT auth with access + refresh tokens and 6-role RBAC
• Live fleet dashboard — utilization, productivity & status KPIs
• Real-time crane monitoring with live telemetry gauges and history
• AI fatigue detection from cabin-camera events with confidence scores
• Safety management — overloads, e-stops, near-misses, per-asset scores
• Maintenance schedules with overdue tracking and service history
• Alert acknowledge/resolve workflow with severity & source filtering
• Analytics with multi-metric trend analysis and crane comparison
• Reports with PDF/Excel export and a continuously updating activity feed
• WebSocket + Redis pub/sub — everything live, no refresh required
• Simulation engine that swaps to real PLC/camera feeds unchanged

Results & impact

Operators get a single live view of the whole fleet — utilization, safety scoring, fatigue alerts and maintenance — replacing manual, reactive monitoring with proactive, real-time intelligence. The hardware-agnostic design means a production rollout reuses the entire software stack.

Screenshots

What I learned

• Decoupling ingestion behind a simulation boundary makes a hardware-dependent product buildable and demoable today.
• Choosing a time-series database early (TimescaleDB) avoids painful re-architecture as telemetry volume grows.
• An event-driven core (WS + Redis pub/sub) keeps realtime features simple to add.