Industry is increasing the use of smart container technology and smart devices (IoT) within their supply chains to improve security, visibility, predictability and to plan more efficiently. They transmit to the smart device’s management system, among other things, the location of the assets (such as shipping containers) to which they are attached or embedded. However the context of where the assets are at a given point in time is often not known unless it is part of the transport plan and is situated within an existing virtual geographic boundary, a geofence.
The UN/CEFACT white paper “Smart Containers: Realtime Smart Container Data for Supply Chain Excellence” outlined a number of practical use cases for a wide variety of actors to implement smart containers (or devices) within their supply chain. However, as many parties can be involved in a transport movement, and container owners may make use of several
vendors of smart devices, along with the shippers’ own smart devices being deployed, there is currently no single definition of a facility, or a methodology to define those facilities with a geofence.This leads to duplicated effort and, more importantly, differences between definitions of the same facility (terminal, berth, container facility or other) and there is no guidance or methodology on how to draw these geofences or to improve quality when reviewing them.