Distributed Process Control by Smart Containers

Abstract

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.