A wireless tracking system now lets a big container shipping firm move containers faster through its 300-acre West Coast terminal, boosting the yard's capacity and pleasing truckers, who now spend less time searching for their loads.

Think of it as RFID for gigantic metal boxes.

The system consists of RFID tags with 2.4GHz radios that periodically emit a signal; another device that can trigger the tags to transmit on demand, such as at an exit gate; a network of wireless access points to triangulate the location of each tag; and server software, which handles the calculations and interfaces to back-end applications.

The WhereNet-based system was deployed in early 2005 at the Global Gateway South terminal at the Port of Los Angeles. Container shipping company APL, the Oakland, Calif., subsidiary of Singapore-based Neptune Orient Lines, owns the terminal, which opened in 1997. WhereNet replaced a cumbersome RFID system, in which a pickup truck loaded with RFID reader, wireless mode and other gear drove slowly up and down the rows of containers on the sprawling site. Each tag was interrogated and the data uploaded, one row at a time, recalls Nathaniel Seeds, APL's director of port operations.

"The real drawback to this is that we were dependent on driving past the tag in order to locate it," he says. "If you drove down a row of 50 containers and behind you a loader deposits a new container [in that row], it might be eight hours before our truck drove past that location again. We weren't getting updates fast enough."

The APL terminal has a daily inventory of 9,000 to 16,000 containers. Fifty percent to 70% of these are wheeled trailers delivered by trucks to be loaded on a ship or waiting to be picked up and hauled away. Each trailer carries WhereNet's RFID tag, called WhereTag, which uses a battery-powered 2.4GHz radio that reaches up to 1,000 feet. APL has bolted the tags to about 30,000 trailers all over Southern California.

The tags make use of the ANSI 371.1 standard for 2.4GHz-based real-time location systems (RTLS), adopted in 2003. The standard creates a uniform way to collect continuous, accurate data on a tagged asset's location and status.

The Yankee Group estimated the 2005 global market for RTLS to be about $20 million, but to reach $1.6 billion by 2010. There are two groups of RTLS vendors, both of them quite small, according to the Yankee study. One group includes WhereNet, Radianse and RF Code. Typically, these companies use unlicensed, but lower frequency, spectrum. A newer group, including AeroScout, Ekahau and PanGo (a Network World 2004 “Start-up to Watch”), have developed location tracking products specifically based on IEEE 802.11 radios.

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