RFID and Container Shipping Term Paper

How Container Tracking Devices will Facilitate International Intermodal Transport

When bar codes were first used to track freight cars on trains more than 60 years ago, these innovations revolutionized the national transportation system because of the automated fashion in which they monitored each car’s location and contents (Smith, 2017). Today, the same trends are taking place with respect to the addition of radio frequency identification (RFID) tracking devices to international intermodal transport containers. Although the addition of RFID tracking devices appears to represent a major step in the same direction as bar codes for train freight cars, the technologies are not without their constraints. To determine the facts, the purpose of this paper is to provide a discussion concerning how new container tracking devices will improve international intermodal transport of goods. A review of the relevant literature in this regard and important findings is followed by a summary of the research in the paper’s conclusion.

Review and Analysis

At present, the global container shipping industry has between 20 and 5 million containers in service, but just a small percentage of these are routinely tracked from point of origin to their destinations (Cozzens, 2016). There is a growing consensus among shipping industry professionals, though, that the addition of tracking devices to containers can facilitate international intermodal transport in significant ways. For example, according to one tracking device vendor, “With businesses relying on the timely movement and arrival of goods via shipping containers, it’s become increasingly important to know where a particular container (or trailer) is at any time, and its transport progress to the final destination” (Container tracking with GPS tracking devices, 2017, para. 2).

One Swiss company that has taken the lead in persuading the international intermodal transport industry to improve operations by integrating RFID tracking devices is Traxens, which has partnered with the Mediterranean Shipping Company and the global container shipping company, CMA CGM, to install RFID tracking devices on their containers. Given that these enterprises account for nearly 25% of the world’s current container shipping, it is clear that the deployment of RFID tracking for containers is already well underway (Cozzens, 2016), and for good reasons.

Some of the ways that these container tracking devices will facilitate international intermodal transport include their ability to use global position system technologies to monitor their locations from point of origin to destination, as well as their ability to use the ship’s own automatic identification system (AIS) for this purpose during transit in order to conserve battery power (Cozzens, 2016). In this regard, Cozzens reports that, “Once we have determined that a container is on board a ship, we can use the AIS ship-positioning data rather than the GPS on the device — especially as the device may be under deck with no view of the sky” (para. 5),…