Transport supervision of perishable goods by embedded context aware objects

Intelligent freight objects can be introduced in order to simplify the solution of complex logistical planning tasks. This enables splitting logistical problems to local executable subtasks. The concept of Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) presents a model to realize such intelligent objects. A local task can be handled autonomously by a group of objects. The realization of UbiComp needs a platform that first provides the computational resources for the implementation of decision algorithms and then, secondly, the position information in order to enable context-aware features. This article presents a concept for the autonomous supervision of perishable goods and introduces the required soft- and hardware. Freight objects are represented by individual software components, which are realized with the JAVA framework OSGi. The whole software is designed to run on wireless sensor nodes to create embedded objects. Because temperature values can differ inside a reefer container, the signal strength of an RFID reader is used to provide position information by a cell based localization. A new approach is presented, where four RFID antennas are used to locate goods inside a container.

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