Forget big, think small for data gains

With an average intercontinental shipment involving over 200 interactions and more than 20 different players, end-to-end supply-chain visibility can be “a real challenge”, according to Laetitia Jay of network operator Sigfox.

Although electrical assets, such as reefers, have been regularly monitored by 2G/3G networks for some time, there’s an issue: these systems are power-hungry, tearing through battery life. So, ordinary boxes and other unpowered kit have generally remained isolated.

That’s all beginning to change with the emergence of Low Powered Wide Area Networks (LPWANs), which make use of very small packets of data.

These can collate five-minute location and environmental condition-monitoring data to be transmitted every hour from the equipment, “giving near real-time updates, while the energy from a coin cell type battery will still last for years”, says Adarsh Krishnan of ABI Research.

People are fast catching on to the advantages, triggering an explosive growth in LPWAN-connected containers: ABI’s figures indicate that their number will increase from 40,000 in 2017 to over 250,000 by the end of this year — and by 2023 he predicts there will be 6.2m in circulation.

The LPWAN infrastructure is likewise growing: US giant Semtech, which provides LoRa technologies, claims 50m-plus nodes are currently in operation.

Moreover, this time ports aren’t just catching the tails of other industries but are on the cutting edge. Innovators, such as Sigfox — which already has 65 logistics partners on board — are “first looking at connecting dry containers inside the port and spreading out from there”, explains Mr Krishnan.

Michelin has been an early adopter/Sigfox partner with a project that helped to iron out the kinks in its containerised freight flows: in fact, Michelin’s Pascal Zammit says that the pilot and follow up work (with collaborator Argon Consult) “has convinced us that achievable gains could reach up to 10% reduction of the on-sea inventory [and a] 40% increase in estimated time of arrival accuracy”.

Most interestingly, he believes this real-time visibility of the inventory will reduce the impact of even unforeseen freight disruption from, say, bad weather, by as much as three-quarters.

IoT link

So, what about the ports themselves? Firstly, to be clear, it’s still the shippers that own the data explains Traxens’ Thomas Nouvian, but by working with MSC and CMA CGM to make an Internet of Things (IoT) solution available to the lines’ top 300 clients, the information will penetrate the entire logistics chain. And the ports are potentially very interested customers.

Therefore the company has been collaborating with Valencia port, which wanted “to see further into its hinterland” says Mr Nouvian’s colleague, Thierry Alcacer. It can also allow tracking and congestion monitoring along the roads outside the gate, “providing information that allows a fluid response” to changing circumstances and improves the port operations.

But there’s a divergence in the underpinning technology used by Sigfox and Traxens. While at sea, all require satellite connection, but on land differences emerge. While both are low(ish)-power networks, LPWAN signals are directly picked up by gateway or base stations in one leap — in open environments, this can be up to 40 kilometres. But the payload is very limited: LoRa’s is 243 bytes while Sigfox’s is a mere 12 bytes, although “it’s enough for a straightforward index report on things like location, environmental condition-monitoring and so on”, says Mr Krishnan.

By contrast, technologies such as Traxens carry far more detailed information which ‘multi-hop’ between sensors: these are linked in what is aptly described as a mesh network with devices just a few hundred metres apart.

So, what happens when the mesh thins out? The gaps are filled by jumping over to either satellite or cellular networks for the backhaul element, potentially resulting in lower latency and closer to real-time data delivery, says Mr Krishnan.

He underlines that the advantage can be measured in just tens of minutes – and you pay a higher rate for it – but it’s worthwhile if immediate visibility gives clients a competitive edge.

Overcoming shyness

Certainly, Traxens is in favour of more, rather than less, intense tracking because that “multiplies the use cases for the customers”, says Mr Nouvian.

Voluntary data sharing (a sticking point for many innovations) is addressed by Traxens through a business model where a legitimate party buys the data but is free to share it with the rest of the ecosystem. While Mr Nouvian admits this level of visibility exposes industry-wide process inefficiencies, “such as overbooking and rolling-over”, in his view, the first movers will gain an enormous advantage by improving operations and deepening relationships with their customers. He’s not alone in his belief: Professor Reza Sahandi of Bournemouth University agrees that when it comes to the supply chain, its various elements will probably overcome their hesitancy once critical mass is reached “and access to market information becomes less of an issue than not taking part”.

However, efficiency isn’t the only attraction: one of the big IoT drivers for Valencia “has been to increase market share”, says Mr Nouvian. “It’s allowed the port to see where it can grab business,” he explains: “Valencia has some big competitors… so it has been very enlightening for them to understand exactly where goods are coming from.”

But, he adds, Traxens’ mission is to give customers complete visibility into their assets anywhere in the world, not only maritime containers. The company already takes its IoT devices onto railway wagons via the Digital Freight Train and in future it wants to get down to ‘pallet level’ says Mr Nouvian, bringing the first and last mile into focus.

Sim card

These aren’t the only systems utilising packeted data for cargo tracking. For example, one of the biggest box manufacturers, China International Marine Containers (CIMC), decided to use the near ubiquitous mobile phone technology to help its clients gain insight on the long Asia-Europe trades.

Therefore, Telenor and Chinese partner AuEase took a modem and a global SIM card and installed it in a range of CIMC’s containers.

There are advantages to the approach, says Mats Lundquist, chief executive of Telenor Connexion: partnering agreements allow the onboard SIM to roam more than 400 networks around the globe giving the tech reach and building penetration, “ensuring high-quality, uninterrupted coverage”.

Admittedly it isn’t the lowest-power option but as Mr Lundquist explains, it’s more accurate to count reports: a 7000mAh battery, in the Telenor/AuEase solution, will provide around 2,800 connections – that is, it keeps going for between two-and-a-half and five years at a rate of between one and three reports a day.

There is flexibility too: “In some cases, such as short-term usage on a China-EU cargo train, the container is rented by the transportation company or the cargo owner,” he explains. So, while the request is for one report per hour, there’s only a three-month lifecycle “and when the container arrives in EU, the device will be thrown away”.

“Overall, the choice – LPWAN, cellular or other wireless network – very much depends on the business case,” says Mr Krishnan. While the LPWAN latency is higher than Industrial Internet of Things networks, with longer periods between picking up the packets of information and smaller payloads “it’s far more cost effective, so it opens up a lot more potential uses”.

However, it’s hard to make a straightforward price comparison as it rests on factors like battery life, maintenance and integration says Ms Jay. She adds that their network uses “very little energy which in turn lowers hardware costs”.

Still, according to Mr Krishnan, LPWAN devices are cheap enough to allow their spread to other assets “such as trolleys, forklifts, power tools and pallets”, in other words, the kind of things that aren’t missed until they’re needed.

CONNECTING OVER 500 MILLION ASSETS

“LPWAN based track-and-trace solutions will connect over 500m assets by 2023,” predicts Adarsh Krishnan of ABI Research.

This is obviously interesting to a broad swathe of logistics and insurance companies: for example, stolen vehicles will “continue to transmit GPS co-ordinates without interruption”, points out Sigfox’s Laetitia Jay.

Tracking can help ports fix warehousing security flaws; Sigfox’s underpinning radio technology is resistant to GSM jamming “one of the most fundamental weaknesses of alarm systems and anti-theft devices”, she explains. Also, the low energy consumption means you can “run detectors and alarm systems for months or even years without needing to replace batteries”. And for some applications, that’s being bypassed by the rise of autonomous and self-powered data transmission.

Importantly, tracking “even extends to people” says Mr Krishnan. Adding sensors to watches, passes or jackets, “may benefit workers’ health and safety… and also makes sure you have the right personnel with the right credentials in the area”.