Two Countries, One Simulator: A Port Virtual Lab Case Study
Two institutes, one simulator, no need for everyone to be in the same room at the same time.
Last April, 29 people sat down for a five-week course built around the Escola’s own simulation platform, Port Virtual Lab (PVL) — 26 students and 3 teachers, split between ITS Aerospazio Piemonte, a vocational institute in Italy, and PRAT FP, a training centre in Barcelona. Some of them never left home for most of it. All of them ended up running the same virtual port community together.
The course, “Intermodal and Green Transport,” was built in three stages. Three online sessions in early April introduced the PVL platform and the fundamentals of international trade. Five in-person days in Barcelona followed, centred on supervised PVL teamwork, a maritime visit to the Port of Barcelona, and stops at the Morrot railway terminal, Logistainer and the Port Nou container terminal. Two closing online sessions in May covered airfreight operations. Twenty-five hours of training in total, entirely in English.
What is Port Virtual Lab?
PVL is the Escola’s own simulation environment for port and logistics operations. Participants take on roles inside virtual shipping lines, freight forwarders, terminals and customs brokers, and run real trade documentation and ERP processes through a simulated — but realistic — port community. It’s what let two institutes in two different countries train as one group without everyone needing to be in the same room.
Inside the simulation
Throughout the course, participants operated inside simulated companies built into PVL — SDG Lines, SDG Airlines, Port Railway, MedTrade, PlayForwarding Logistics, PlayCustoms and others — handling the kind of work a real port community runs on every day: export and import maritime operations, electronic documentation, ERP management through Click&Cargo, tariff classification, and airfreight bookings. It’s hands-on work — teams negotiated commercial offers, processed shipments end to end, and presented their results to the group, all inside the platform.
Students practicing with PVL during the simulation part of the training programme
The blend of formats did the work that travel usually does in a course like this. The online sessions carried the groundwork — platform training, trade concepts, documentation — while the five days in Barcelona were reserved for what only works in person: the supervised teamwork, the port visits, the closing presentations. Students from two countries and two institutes ended the course having built and run the same simulated operations together.
Participants rated the course 4.3 out of 5 overall, with the highest marks going to interaction with trainers and support (4.66) and to the maritime visit to the Port of Barcelona (4.64). More than one participant asked for more time on the PVL platform itself — a good problem for a simulator to have.
What comes after a course like this
The course was booked and delivered as a standard PVL training — invoiced to each institute individually, no EU funding involved. But it left ITS Piemonte’s own contact asking the Escola’s Italy team a bigger question: could a course like this be run as a proper Erasmus+ programme instead, with more institutes and EU funding behind it?
The Escola’s Italy team is now exploring exactly that, under the Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme (BIP) format — built for precisely this shape of course: a short physical mobility period combined with a compulsory virtual component, run jointly by institutions from several different countries. The idea takes the same format the April course used, and widens it: more partner institutes, more countries, and EU funding behind the training instead of a course booked one institute at a time.
