Autonomous Ports at DFDS

Context

DFDS moves large volumes of freight through its ferry ports, and the company was moving toward driverless trucks to handle part of that flow. Letting autonomous vehicles operate in a working port needs software that can coordinate their movements reliably in production, which is exactly what the developer and platform department was being built to support.

What I did

Autonomous Ports was one of the three teams I led inside the Developer & Platform Experience department. The team built the software to handle driverless trucks moving through DFDS ports, on .NET Core and running on the cloud-native platform the department had established, so it shipped and operated on the same self-service and golden paths as the rest of the engineering organisation. I set the team up, gave it the operating model to run in production, and kept it aligned with the wider move to microservices on Kubernetes.

Outcome

DFDS gained a dedicated team and a set of cloud-native services for handling driverless trucks in its ports, built and run on the company’s shared platform rather than as a side system. It was one of the concrete product teams that proved the platform could carry real, physical business workloads.