As Vietnam races to double its cargo capacity by 2030, Portcoast shapes how ports are planned, built and run. Portcoast, an engineering consulting firm, touches on the entire marine project lifecycle short of physical construction, from geological and financial studies to design and operational support. In an exclusive interview at this year’s Esri User Conference, Quang Tran, the Deputy General Director and CIO of Portcoast, outlined how his team uses immersive 3D digital twins powered by ArcGIS, reality capture and AI to help clients build out the country’s ports. For anyone involved in drones, geospatial and critical infrastructure, Portcoast’s work offers a first-hand look at what operational digital twins look like when they leave the slide deck and go to work on the waterfront.
Ports As A National Innovation Engine
Vietnam’s long coastline makes maritime trade central to its economic strategy and its port sector one of the country’s core business drivers. Vietnam’s ports connect domestic manufacturing centers to intra-Asian trade and, through deep water gateways such as Cai Mep–Thi Vai, directly to markets in Europe and North America. Portcoast traces its roots to one of the earliest post-war organizations dedicated to consulting and engineering for this maritime ecosystem. It now sits at the center of many of its most complex projects.
For Tran and his team, ports have become a proving ground for infrastructure intelligence that can scale across sectors. Today the firm’s work reaches well beyond bulkheads and berths. Building on its port expertise, Portcoast now applies the same reality capture and spatial computing stack across critical infrastructure. This supports digital transformation for metro lines, rail corridors, hospitals and schools.
Reality Capture As The Foundation For Digital Twins
Reality capture forms the backbone of Portcoast’s digital twin strategy. “We have terrestrial laser scanners, which are basically ground‑based point cloud laser scanners, as well as the USVs, the unmanned surface vessels,” Tran explained. Instead of treating these as separate tools, Portcoast integrates them into a single workflow designed to create high‑fidelity, multi‑source 3D representations of complex sites. UAVs perform aerial photogrammetry and lidar, capturing terrain, structures and equipment from above. Mobile mapping systems ride on vehicles to collect data along roadways and internal circulation routes. USVs survey underwater areas and tricky under‑berth zones where divers and crewed boats struggle to operate. Drones even fly beneath structures to scan upward‑facing surfaces that traditional crews cannot easily reach.
All of that data flows into ArcGIS. There, point clouds, meshes and imagery are aligned, cleaned and prepared as the geospatial foundation for Building Information Modeling (BIM) models and operational layers. This results in a detailed, accurate digital view of each facility that can support both engineering design and day‑to‑day decision‑making.
BIM And GIS: From Compliance To Advantage
Vietnam’s government has accelerated the digitalization of critical infrastructure through a national push, with an emphasis on its use in construction. “One of the primary drivers that they’re pushing is BIM,” Tran said. For new construction and significant updates, including port projects, 3D BIM models are now mandatory for design approvals.
Portcoast leaned into that requirement early. “We do all of our engineering design work in BIM and 3D,” Tran noted. What sets the firm apart is how it connects those models to the real world through GIS. Reality capture data provides the spatial context of the site, and the BIM model sits directly on top of that surface inside ArcGIS.
“We’re able to understand how our design is going to look in the physical world… any potential issues, any optimizations, any clashes with the physical world,” he explained. That combined view allows engineers and operators to see whether new quay walls, warehouses or conveyor towers will interact cleanly with existing infrastructure and terrain before construction begins.
A Grain Port Digital Twin In Action
As one example of the power of this approach, Tran described a grain terminal that Portcoast helped modernize in southern Vietnam. At the Ba Ria–Vung Tau port, the operator needed to add a new warehouse while optimizing how maize and wheat would move from arriving vessels through a web of towers, pipes and conveyors.
Tran’s team began by deploying its full reality capture toolkit. UAVs flew the site to generate point clouds and textured meshes, terrestrial laser scanners captured facades and equipment, and USVs mapped the bathymetry and underside of critical structures. That data became the spatial foundation for a detailed BIM model of the port and its grain handling systems.
“We created that 3D model… we built the digital twin based on that model of the entire port,” Tran said. Inside ArcGIS, the port operator could then test different design options and operational scenarios.
“They wanted to know where do we place these towers, where do we build out the conveyor belt flow, how do we optimize the flow of the grain,” he explained. Traditional workflows would have relied on 2D drawings and spreadsheets. This would have made it hard to see how new conveyors would intersect existing lines or how elevation changes might affect flow. With the digital twin, the team could see real‑world heights and distances, estimate transit times from vessel to warehouse and identify potential conflicts with other warehouses before anything was built.
Tran called it “a really cool application” because it moved digital twins from simple visualization to true operational optimization. As a result, the grain port did not just become more efficient. Spatially aware simulations de-risked its expansion and gave stakeholders confidence in their design choices.
AI And GeoAI: Scaling Infrastructure Intelligence
AI provides the next layer in Portcoast’s stack. Tran views AI as essential to making sense of the massive volumes of data produced by reality capture across cities and industrial zones. “We are already seeing the… amazing capabilities coming out of the AI models,” he noted, referencing both general large language models and Esri’s GeoAI tools integrated into ArcGIS.
Traditional surveying teams might spend weeks or months documenting large urban areas or industrial parks. With UAVs, Portcoast can capture those same areas quickly. This generates dense datasets that include terrain, buildings, roads, vegetation and utilities. AI then steps in to classify and extract features automatically.
“Now we can easily classify, identify, for example, what are the tree levels, what are the building footprints, what are the road markings… much faster than the traditional methods,” Tran noted. Instead of engineers manually tracing every building and asset, AI now handles most of the work, often getting “almost 80%, 90% of the way there,” so human experts can focus on verification and refinement.
“With that large amount of data, applying AI to help us efficiently process and work through this data is a huge game changer for us in the GIS community,” he said. In short, GIS and AI intersect to make large‑scale digital twins practical instead of aspirational.
Digital Twins Beyond Design: The O&M Opportunity
Most digital twin deployments today focus on design and construction. Tran believes the bigger opportunity lies ahead in operations and maintenance (O&M), where the majority of the costs and expenses in an infrastructure project arise.
“In that O&M phase we think digitalization is going to give the most benefit,” he said. Once a facility has a high‑quality BIM model anchored in the real world through GIS, with live feeds from IoT sensors, vessel traffic and equipment telemetry, operators can start using that shared view to coordinate work, plan schedules and respond to issues in near real time.
Tran envisions that optimization, visualization and coordination benefits will emerge as more organizations treat digital twins as everyday tools for O&M teams rather than static models for designers. It is early days, but Portcoast intends to be part of the push that turns digital twins into a standard part of O&M practice across ports and other critical infrastructure.
From Vietnam’s Waterfront To Global Projects
Portcoast’s work may be rooted in Vietnam, but its reach has become increasingly global. “Right now we’re doing a lot of reality capture projects, not just in Vietnam, but also in other countries like Pakistan or even as far as Panama,” Tran pointed out. That global footprint underscores the portability (no pun) of the firm’s toolkit. Reality capture, BIM, GIS and AI can be adapted to very different regulatory environments, geographies and asset types.
If you are building strategies around drones, GeoAI, advanced air mobility or counter‑UAS in critical infrastructure environments, the ports of Vietnam offer a concrete, operational case study in how to turn spatial computing and AI into everyday decision tools.
For stakeholders who want to see these systems in action, Portcoast’s website highlights ArcGIS visualizations and an extensive equipment list. You can also find the company and Tran on LinkedIn.