July 10, 2006
Coupling RFID and Sensors for Port and Border Security
Protecting the Nation's Seaports: Balancing Security and Cost is a document of nearly 300 pages which outlines some measures for protecting the United States borders, particularly via seaports. In the entire document, RFID technology is only mentioned a few times, aside from the glossary and references. But those few mentions suggest some powerful uses of RFID technology.
The document is presented by the PPIC (Public Policy Institute of California, links below), and edited by Jon D. Haveman and Howard J. Shatz. There are several chapters written by various researchers.
The first reference to RFID comes on page 140, as part of a section on how technology can be used to help validate the contents of shipping containers. They state earlier that "[d]etection technologies can be put in two places: in-port or in-box," coupled with information systems to organize and analyze collected data.
As part of the in-box detection technology, it's suggested that "sniffers" be used to sense "radiation, people, light, motion, temperature, humidity, explosives, specific chemical traces." These sensing abilities would be coupled with RFID, which would be used to communicate real-time readings, as well as provide location tracking.
It's interesting to note here that researchers in Japan are working on a number of similar sensors coupled with RFID technology. Their sensors would be used to detect sound, heat, chemicals, seismic vibrations, etc. The RFID tags in each sensor would contribute to an array of tags that would communicate with each other, as well as RFID scanners physically outside the network.
These sensors would be used in disaster recovery, for example in earthquakes, to help pinpoint where survivors might be. Similar sensors could very well be used to detect contents of shipping containers, as the PPIC document suggests.
The document indicates that there are about 15 million shipping containers worldwide, of which about a million at most would enter US seaports, and which would be outfitted with RFID-enabled tamper-prooflocks. The lowest figure per lock system (including RFID and sensors) is indicated at US$560.00. Which means an operation to outfit suitable shipping containers would cost over a half billion dollars.
There are, however, other more suitable systems that are in the $1,000-1,200 range. If all containers worldwide were to be outfitted, the total cost rises to over $15 billion, which the document says is just for a five-year period. The per trip cost figure given is $75, part of which, they imply, would be recouped due to reduced costs of properly tracked and documented goods.
In all, this is a worthwhile document to browse if you are either in the shipping or distribution business, or otherwise have an interest in port security, especially for solutions that use RFID.
[Sources: (PDF)]
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