Carrier Schenker confirmed an early arrival by 40 minutes. The assigned slot was 14:30. How do we handle it?
AGENT · DOCK COORDINATOR
Docks and warehouses manage vehicle access with booking and priority.
Dock Coordinator orchestrates vehicle access to docks, warehouses, and sorting centres for the logistics operator. Slot booking system, priority management (urgent shipments, strategic customers), real-time recalibration for disruptions. Waiting times go down without adding gate personnel.
Dock Coordinator at work.
Dock 7 is free from 13:50, compatible with the early arrival. Dock 4 (originally assigned) is already occupied by a delayed vehicle. Proposal: reassign Schenker to dock 7 from 13:50. No impact on subsequent carriers. Shall I send notification?
Yes, go ahead.
Reassignment complete. Notification sent to Schenker and the gate team. The event is in the audit registry.
Why it exists.
Logistics terminals — port docks, sorting warehouses, distribution centres — manage multiple vehicle arrivals every day under tight capacity constraints: number of physical bays, operating hours, safety rules, customer priorities. The manual pattern generates queues, long carrier waiting times, and extra costs for transport operators.
How it works each day.
Dock Coordinator manages the slot booking system. Carriers book their slot via the terminal's app or portal; the agent validates availability, applies the priority rules (urgent shipments, strategic customers, booking order), assigns the slot. At arrival, the agent recognises the carrier via the access system, confirms the assigned dock, and tracks the times.
The decision stays with the manager.
For significant changes (disruption involving a strategic customer, dock failure with urgent recalibration), the agent proposes the solution to the operations manager, who confirms. Confirmation of the most critical reassignments stays with the manager.
From dock manager to terminal operations director.
Terminal operations manager
The operations manager reclaims the time spent on manual access management. The capacity concentrates on handling disruptions and non-standard priorities. Recalibration decisions on strategic customers return under control rather than under pressure.
Dock BK-4 12 slots today
09:30 · carrier A high priority
10:15 · carrier B standard
11:00 · carrier C delayed · rescheduled
Average wait time: 18'
Gate staff
Gate staff work with clear assignments for each incoming carrier. Access management becomes procedural, not discretionary. Carrier disputes about slot assignment go down because the system is traced.
Vendor · Acme Forge due diligence
Credit info B+ · 36 months
ESG · CSRD reporting complete
Geopolitics monitored
Approval bundle to the buyer
Carrier and end customer
Carriers and end customers receive timely slot confirmations, with automatic notification of any changes. Waiting time at the dock goes down, the carrier has ex-ante visibility on their slot.
Line L3 · SKU-441 7-day fcst
Week 23 8,400 units
Week 24 9,100 units
MES · MRP fed
Variance vs plan: +6%
A terminal with 80 accesses a day.
The carrier books from the portal; the agent validates and assigns.
For a distribution centre with 80 vehicle accesses a day and 12 active docks, Dock Coordinator manages the slot schedule via the carrier portal integrated during delivery. A carrier for a strategic customer books the 14:30 slot via the portal. The agent validates availability, applies the priority rule for the customer, assigns dock 7. A confirmation with QR code reaches the carrier via the app.
50-minute delay: automatic schedule recalibration.
In the afternoon, a vehicle scheduled for 15:00 reports a 50-minute delay. The agent recalibrates: moves the delayed vehicle to 16:00, notifies gate staff, verifies the 15:00 slot remains available for the next vehicle in queue. The operations manager receives the change notification on Slack with the updated schedule.
The full event stays in the runtime audit registry.
The operations manager validates the recalibration. The agent notifies the carrier and gate staff. The full event — booking, arrival, dock assignment, change — stays in the runtime audit registry. Quarterly review of access patterns runs on inspectable data.
Declarative rules, terminal management system in delivery.
The Dock Coordinator rules are declarative. The terminal operations team defines in a readable format the booking rules (time windows, maximum vehicles per slot, buffer rules between accesses), the priorities (strategic customer, urgency, booking order), the disruption rules (tolerated delay before recalibration, reserve windows). The rules live in the customer's repository, versioned, validated at agent startup.
Integration with the terminal management system and carrier portal is delivered via a dedicated adapter during the project by the Exelab team.
- Language
- TypeScript (Node.js)
- LLM model
- customer's choice: Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, open source models hosted internally, AWS Bedrock for a private model
- Built-in controls used
- pii-detector, topic-guardrail
- Native delivery channels
- Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, OpenAI-compatible HTTP
- Terminal management system + carrier portal integration
- dedicated adapter delivered during the project
- Memory
- persistent per instance, pgvector + PostgreSQL FTS on access patterns
- Registry
- append-only, queryable with a standard SQL client
Frequently asked questions about the agent.
For standard assignments — carrier with booked slot, dock available, no changes — the agent assigns and notifies on its own. For significant changes (disruption involving a strategic customer, dock failure with urgent recalibration), the agent proposes the solution to the operations manager, who confirms.
Integration with the terminal management system and carrier portal is delivered via a dedicated adapter. Technical feasibility depends on the terminal's specific system. Exelab works with the most common systems in the European logistics sector.
When a dock becomes unavailable (failure, urgent maintenance), the agent recalibrates the schedule for the affected slots, proposes reassignment to the affected carriers, and notifies the operations manager. Confirmation of the most critical reassignments (strategic customers, urgent shipments) stays with the manager.
The typical pattern for Dock Coordinator is 12-16 weeks. Discovery 2-3 weeks, rule and priority configuration 3-4 weeks, terminal management system and carrier portal integration 5-7 weeks, hand-off to the operations team 2 weeks.
From a 30-minute conversation to the squad in production.
A 30-45 minute conversation to understand how Dock Coordinator would configure to the terminal's case. How many docks, which management system, which priority rules for customers.