Distributed Process Control by Smart Containers

Most of the actual sea freight is transported in ISO standard containers today. The number of containers shipped per year has been increasing continuously over the last years and is expected to further grow, see e.g. [1]. Dealing with these increasing numbers and the data generated along their way is a great challenge for today’s logistic and IT systems. We believe that these problems can best be faced through encapsulation and decentralization. Our goal is to increase the automation within the port by using emerging technologies to enable a distributed container handling approach with proactive containers. These smart containers monitor their environment, provide status information and interact with others. All these capabilities should be used to control the process flow of the container’s handling. Our research vision is focussed on the port. We are aware that additional requirements arise, for example from supply chain event monitoring, but nevertheless believe this to be an acceptable constraint. We assume a smart container that is capable of wirelessly registering itself, when entering the port. The further processing of the container can then be controlled by the container itself through its state. The container would know its contents (pack list) along with its routing. Additionally the container would be equipped with sensors to monitor its interior and exterior environment, and change its state proactively. Technologically we want to use the ZigBee and LEACH routing protocol to build up the network and develop a software platform as a service-oriented architecture based on the UPC UA Architecture and using OSGi as the framework.