The cold chain mission is quite simple - manage temperature and environmental conditions of perishable products from the point of origin, through distribution, to the consumer, ensuring maximum cargo quality and safety. Perishable cargo’s end-to-end journey can have up to ten hand-off points from farm to table where small temperature deviations along the way can have a cumulative effect on quality. When containerized perishable cargo is at sea, systems that enhance the crew member’s situational awareness for managing temperature deviations, with minimal response time, are required to sustain quality and safety. Improving Situational Awareness and Response Time Maintains Perishable Quality and Safety Situational awareness is comprehending events within an environment and projecting future possible outcomes to determine likely responses - it is an acute awareness of events in your surroundings. Achieving situational awareness relies on your ability to see, understand and analyze the world around you in the context of what you are trying to do. Situational awareness has been recognized as a critical, yet often elusive, foundation for successful decision-making across a broad range of scenarios, many of which involve the protection of human life and property. For example, when driving a car, you look in the rear-view mirror and notice the person behind you paying more attention to their phone than the road. Your awareness of the situation will dictate your current and future actions. Inadequate situational awareness has been identified as one of the primary factors in accidents attributed to human error. The medical community often cites the “golden hour” as the crucial time for administering treatment to a critically injured patient to prevent irreversible damage. For perishables at sea, where it is normal for crew members to manually inspect refrigerated containers, temperature deviations can persist for hours before intervention. One study found that temperature variability for foods during distribution can be as high as 10° C which can be a leading contributor to the often-cited United Nations estimate of one-third of food waste from farm to fork. With ninety percent of goods transported by sea, equipping shipping lines with tools that enable ideal situational awareness and faster response from crew members will help maintain perishable quality and safety. Detecting Temperature Deviations via Manual Inspection is Inefficient
Centralized Monitoring of Containers Onboard Vessels Improves Situational Awareness
Wireless Text Alerting of Container Alarms Improves Response Time
WMS’ Mixed Fleet Capabilities Enable Interoperability at Sea According to one study, about sixty percent of temperature-controlled cargo losses can be attributed to a combination of incorrect temperature settings, reefer equipment breakdown, failure to plug in the reefer and reefer damage. Ensuring seafarers are equipped with the tools to minimize temperature-affecting issues is critical to accomplishing the mission of managing perishable product quality and safety at sea. At Wireless Maritime Services, we have partnered with leading telematics providers, and Druid Software, to deliver a wireless Internet of Things (IoT) vessel network enabling container visibility, efficiency and operational remote control at sea. We are committed to empower seafarers with capabilities for more efficient, easier and safer container vessel operations.
Faster response times to temperature deviations on containers at sea is achievable with wireless IoT networks capable of proactively alerting crew members. Additionally, choosing the right solution provider capable of supporting mixed fleets accelerates digitizing maritime transportation at sea. Druid’s RAEMIS Software Orchestrates Roaming at Sea and Port Automation Global mobile IoT applications suffer from gaps, such as vessels at sea, in coverage where IoT devices can no longer be monitored. Druid’s IoT Reach solution deployed by WMS, lights up these gaps with coverage for IoT devices. IoT reach can operate in licensed or unlicensed spectrum depending on the specific use case. It acts as an inbound roaming network for IoT devices and provides a real time management interface to identify the IoT devices present on its radio resources. Some sample vertical markets for IoT reach include Maritime Container tracking, telemetry for Utilities, mining, Gas fields, pipelines. Cargo handling is a highly automated business, the use of unmanned container handling equipment is becoming necessary for shipping companies to maintain competitiveness. The deployment of unmanned vehicles requires large amounts of data to cope with the positioning application, vehicle control and cargo data. Druid’s private cellular 4G & 5G RaemisTM platform provides dedicated secure coverage, low latency and ease of management and expansion which is critical for this type of solution. Two customer references in the segment we can share are our LTE Rotterdam Port deployment running for over 6 years now, and more recently in 2021, the Port of Oakland in the San Francisco Bay Area. For information on Wireless Maritime Services’ IoT at Sea solutions, please visit wmsatsea.com. To learn more about Druid Software, please visit druidsoftware.com.
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