iTECH: RFID Finds Place on Trucks in Port Service

By Stephen Bennett, Contributing Writer

This story appears in the April/May issue of iTECH, published in the April 14 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

Shippers may have more interest in radio frequency identification tags than do general freight truckers. After all, RFID tags are a wireless form of bar-code stickers and data capture, and RFID is widely marketed as a tool for inventory and warehousing.

It’s a supply chain thing.

Truck movements of the logistics kind are perhaps better candidates for “RFID-ization” than over-the-road haulers. One example is offered by NYK Logistics, which is installing RFID vehicle transponders to provide advance notice that drayers are departing Southern California’s Port of Long Beach for the company’s nearby cross dock.

NYK plans to start rolling out the system this spring and have it fully operational by summer’s end, said Rick Crawford, vice president of operations.

“We can get notification from the drivers as they leave the terminals as to which container they’re bringing to our facility,” he said. Arrival time can be predicted, and the logistics company can “staff up” as the inbound volume grows.

“Additionally, we’ll be able to validate which container they’re bringing and decide whether it needs to go right to a door or be staged in parking,” Crawford said. “It also will allow us to pre-authorize that arrival, so that we’ll be able to speed that transaction at the gate.”

NYK Logistics bought the RFID-enabled yard management system from WhereNet Corp. The technology is compatible with the PierPass system at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. PierPass Inc. is a not-for-profit company, created by marine terminal operators at the ports, that has equipped thousands of drayage trucks with RFID tags for traffic management and security.

The basis of RFID is very short-range radio: Stationary antennas receive signals from either passive or active transponders. Passive tags are queried (activated) by the antenna; active tags are battery-powered and generate their own signals.

“The tractors are permanently outfitted with RFID tags,” Crawford said. “We have a database, by tag, that tells us who the driver is of that particular vehicle.” The automatic identification includes drayage partner and license information – “all of the stuff that we normally have to validate when they come to the gate.”

For the system to be fully effective, the driver has to participate.

Once a container is loaded onto a trailer at the port, the driver will use his or her cell phone to text-

message the container number to NYK’s cross-dock facility. The phone number is paired with the RFID tag on the tractor.

“We have that as a key to identify that driver and that tractor,” Crawford said. With those three pieces of information — container, vehicle, driver — the company expects to process arriving vehicles more quickly and enhance the efficiency of its 100-door cross dock.

The idea is to choreograph a trailer ballet. Steve Raymond, WhereNet’s vice president of marketing, said software detects the presence or absence of a trailer at a dock door. The application has a computer model of the yard, with numbered rectangles corresponding to doors and trailer spots, and can order the yard jockey to bring up the next trailer.

RFID vehicle tags transmit whenever they encounter a magnetic field. The magnetic fields are created by antennas at yard gates and on the yard tractors that move trailers.

The server running the yard management software interprets the signal and displays where that RFID tag is located. A tag positioned at, say, door No. 5 means that particular bay is occupied.

The program also indicates slack time — when no tag is transmitting from a door — and automatically creates a message that appears on a tablet-style PC screen in the cab of the “switcher” (yard tractor), alerting the driver to bring a trailer to the empty door.

“That’s important, because a lot of delays over time can impact the productivity of the warehouse,” Raymond said.

Capabilities and costs of RFID tags vary widely, and that partly determines how much of a difference an RFID-enabled system may make to supply chain efficiency.

Purely passive RFID tags tend to be cheapest — 50 cents to about $1 — and can be read up to a range of about 10 feet. They function more or less as a label.

On the high end are battery-powered “active” tags with transmission ranges of several hundred feet. Some of these can be integrated with the Global Positioning System for tracking the trailer’s or container’s whereabouts. Active tags can cost $30 or more.

Some vendors of RFID hardware — tags and their readers — design their products to work with software from more than one provider, and some software providers design their programs to work with more than one hardware supplier’s products.

Intelliflex, a hardware supplier, is an example.

“Our tag is called a battery-assisted passive tag,” Sam Liu, director of marketing for Intelliflex, said. Operating on ultra-high frequency, the tag works over a distance of approximately 150 feet. Liu said the tag stores information, “like a small database.” One tag, for example, can contain the electronic manifest of a trailer’s contents.

“Once the trailer pulls up, all they have to do is read the trailer tag — without opening up the trailer — and they know what’s in the trailer, and whether it needs to be unloaded or sent for cross-docking,” Liu said.

Among the software that Intelliflex hardware works with is an RFID-enabled yard management system provided by Fluensee.

Tim Harvie, president of Fluensee, said his company’s products include an RFID-enabled asset-tracking program for containers, pallets and even cartons on the pallets.

Passive tags are attached to each item, and the software shows that specific cartons are on a specific pallet, in a tagged container — and then associate that container with a tagged trailer, Harvie said.