Container yards are massive areas where trucks, trailers and other large haul vehicles lug in containers, deposit them for transfer to other trucks or ships. Similarly they pick up containers offloaded from ships or other trucks. This is of course, not as simple to operate as it sounds. Some container yards easily measure 25 kilometers across having thousands of containers,either to be deposited or awaiting pick-up. Truck drivers are interested in picking up or depositing their containers in the shortest possible time.Even large amounts of staff, radio handsets, access to computer terminals and databases do not make this task easy.
Drivers have no waiting time inside the yard.
The RFID solution is to go in for a RLTS (Real Time Location System). This involves installing a UHF system (operating at say 868 MHz). The UHF system consists of RFID tags of UHF type (long range tags), mounted on the containers themselves and a slew of powerful UHF readers, located around the perimeter of the yard.The readers are connected to a central computer database, which manages the system.
In future most container terminals and associated yards will implement some kind of an RFID system, similar to the one described here. Increasing pressures to improve security. speed up transportation while at the same time reduce costs will drive more yards to implement such systems.
