Companies developing cloud-linked tracking sensors
DALLAS: After Intel Corp couldn’t find a device that indicated when sensitive chip-making machines tilted too much during shipping, the company decided to build one itself.
The maker of microprocessors teamed up with Honeywell International Inc, which makes hand-held warehouse computers, to create a system that can monitor vibration, temperature, unauthorised openings, and a host of other things on pallets of goods or even individual packages. It is being tested by shippers including Kuehne & Nagel International AG, DHL Worldwide Express and Bertelsmann SE.
The many freight-tracking products now in the US$8 trillion worldwide logistics market usually only trace a large container or truck. The devices don’t have an on-board computer that gives detailed information and on which new applications can be created, said Martin Kolbe, chief information officer at Switzerland’s Keuhne & Nagel.
“It’s real-time monitoring on the one hand, but you can do much more with the data,” Kolbe said in a telephone interview. “This is creating a new eco-environment where over the next years more solutions will come in.”
The tracking system is part of Intel and Honeywell’s effort to introduce products that use sensors linked to the Internet to collect data on machinery, office buildings, aircraft, and freight to make them operate more efficiently or to spot maintenance problems before a breakdown.
The Honeywell-Intel product consists of sensors linked to one transponder that relays data to cloud-computing networks where it can be monitored and processed. The sensors, which now cost more than US$10 a piece, can be placed on pallets or individual packages while the transponder can be placed among the packages or on the vessel.
Honeywell wants to drive down the price of the sensors to as low as US$2, said Taylor Smith president of Honeywell’s workflow solutions business.
Reducing the cost of the system will help gin up demand beyond goods such as medicines, fresh food and high-tech equipment that require close monitoring and have high value. The market for monitoring freight is about US$4bil, Smith said.
“We think this could open that market even more,” Smith said.
Many transportation companies provide tracking services, but it’s a patchwork system with some working better than others, Kolbe said. The ability to track a package that’s handed off among different carriers is appealing, and decisions to reroute or even adjust variables such as temperature could be made on the fly, he said.