Trucking firm turns to RFID to fill black hole

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Being able to track freight across the US using the chips is Horizon Lines’ goal

By Marc L Songini | Framingham | Monday, 19 February, 2007

Horizon Lines has turned to radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to track containers seamlessly from a Seattle distribution centre over the sea and land to their final destination in Alaska.

While containers can be monitored while in ships and trains, historically, they vanish into black holes when being trucked on highways, says Rick Kessler, CIO of Horizon Lines and its IT subsidiary, Horizon Services Group. The lack of RFID readers near many remote highways creates an “intermodal black hole” where passive RFID chips cannot be read, he says. Passive RFID tags have no local power source, and must be contacted by readers before they can transmit data, using the reader as a source of energy. The chips are generally limited to a few feet in range.

To overcome the lack of highway readers, the company placed so-called active RFID tags, which use an internal power source to contact readers, on 5100 containers.

The active tags have a range of about 90m and can be read while moving at speeds of up 120 km/h. The active RFID tags used were from Identec Solutions, a UK-based maker of RFID systems. Also participating in the pilot was grocery retailer Safeway, which ships goods to its Alaska stores on Horizon trucks.

trucking on

The implementation, completed last northern autumn, required placing readers at two strategic spots on the primary truck routes in Alaska. A container full of goods can be tracked all the way from Safeway’s Pacific Seattle distribution centres up to its stores in Anchorage.

Horizon officials won’t disclose the amount of savings generated by the new process, but notes that it permits a shipper to know the exact location of a load, the time of delivery, and allow it to schedule its operations more precisely and plan for any exceptions, delays or high priority movements. If there are problems with a shipment delivery, the customer can react accordingly.

Ultimately, says Kessler, Horizon would like to tag every container in its entire fleet, creating supply chain visibility all the way from Hawaii, Guam and Puerto Rico to the continental United States. The Horizon Services Group, he says, is studying methods for deploying an RFID reader network on the highway system in the US.