Alexandria's Container Terminals: CATOS and the Camera Gates

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below · 🔎 Last verified

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means

The state-owned Alexandria Container and Cargo Handling Company runs the container terminals at Alexandria and El-Dekheila on CATOS, a terminal operating system covering ship and berth planning, yard and warehouse handling, EDI messaging with shipping lines and invoicing tied to Egypt's electronic invoice system. Each terminal has its own optical-character-recognition gate — four checkpoints at Alexandria including a plate-reading lane, two at El-Dekheila — photographing trucks in and out, converting the images into automatic data entries and detecting container damage. Neither the company nor any authority publishes a go-live date, so this entry carries none.

Live 📅 since null

🎓 Lesson

The measurement exists and the evidence does not. Everything verifiable here comes from the operator's own pages; the one academic study, from the maritime academy in the same city, set out to analyse implementation challenges and reports no productivity series. The '25 minutes per container' figure in circulation belongs to the separate Tahya Misr multipurpose terminal, not to these container terminals.

Sources

↗ Alexandria Container & Cargo Handling Company — 'Terminal Operating systems' (operator)'The CATOS system that is currently performing at both Alexandria and El-Dekhilla terminals is a fully integrated system…'. Lists the OCR gate layout: Alexandria — Portal 1 IN, Portal 2 OUT, Portal 3 OUT, LPR Lane OUT; El-Dekheila — Portal 1 IN, Portal 2 OUT; functions include imaging trucks at gate in/out, converting images to automatic data entry and detecting container damage. No dates given anywhere on the page.
↗ ElNakib & Ismail, MARLOG vol. 14 (2025), Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport (conference paper)'Analyzing the Implementation of Terminal Operating System on Enhancing the Efficiency of Alexandria Container Terminal'. Abstract: the research 'aims at investigating and analyzing the challenges encountered during the implementation of the CTOS at Alexandria Cargo Handling and Container Company'. Uses SWOT plus Data Envelopment Analysis over 2019–2023; the abstract states no efficiency result and gives no implementation year.
📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Alexandria's Container Terminals: CATOS and the Camera Gates” — Alexandria, Egypt. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/alexandria-container-terminal-tos/ (last verified 2026-08-06). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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