Wireless IoT Vessel Networks Shortens Temperature Deviation Response Time to Minutes

Lee Mabie, VP Strategy, Product Development & Marketing

Crew member receives container alarm notifications as text messages anywhere on the vessel at sea

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

With the dawn of the digital age, the maritime shipping industry is undergoing a transformation to move away from manual to automated processes. The recently formed Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA), and other industry organizations, is mandated to creating digital standards for the ecosystem to adopt to help make these changes a reality.
 
Given that digitization is emerging in maritime shipping, manual inspections of containers at sea is still the most widely used method for finding temperature deviations at sea. This activity involves crew members walking the ship periodically throughout the day (e.g. every four to six hours) to check the status of refrigerated containers. When sea conditions are not ideal, like rough seas, manual inspections cannot take place.
 
Situational awareness of all containers onboard is limited as crew members can only inspect one container at a time and only every few hours. For example, a container in a forward cargo hold experiencing an alarm that has shut down the equipment and stopped cooling may not be noticed for hours. Additionally, with multiple alarms onboard effectively triaging critical alarms from non-critical alarms is also somewhat diminished without a holistic status of all containers onboard.

This type of monitoring creates conditions where cargo quality may be potentially damaging. For temperature-sensitive cargo, the change in one or two degrees, even for a small period, can affect quality and safety of the product.

Centralized Monitoring of Containers Onboard Vessels Improves Situational Awareness

In recent years, on vessel systems were developed to perform rudimentary centralized power monitoring of refrigerated containers. This led to the innovation of wireless systems which provide crew members visibility of temperature deviations in a single location onboard a ship – like a computer dedicated to cargo monitoring.

Alternative methods of centralized monitoring may also include shoreside teams that communicate back to a vessel when a cargo-affecting incident occurs.

However, crew members wear many hats and unless there are dedicated personnel sitting in front of the computer 24 / 7 at sea, situational awareness can still be less than ideal. Crew members may be responsible for checking in at the terminal on rotation, for example every one hour, as tying up valuable crew resources to wait on an issue to occur may not be efficient.
 
While situational awareness for centralized monitoring should theoretically be better than manual inspections, centralized monitoring response time is limited to the time intervals between crewmembers checking in with the monitoring system. In both manual inspection and centralized monitoring models, crew members have the burden of looking for alarms at dedicated locations on the vessel.
 
Centralized monitoring, because of the ability to spot alarms more efficiently, and triage alarms based upon severity, should limit the effects of potential cargo damage better than manual inspections.

Wireless Text Alerting of Container Alarms Improves Response Time

Wireless telematics solutions are wonders of human ingenuity enabling a step-change in cargo operations, providing valuable data and creating efficiencies for all cold chain participants. While the technology by itself is amazing, how people leverage technology is paramount.
 
With wireless networks onboard a vessel today, coupled with a robust centralized container monitoring system, the capability exists to push container alarms to a crew member mobile handset. This situational awareness is ideal as crew members have the freedom to be anywhere on the vessel and receive container alarms as text messages. The advantages are the crew member does not have to search for alarms, but rather the awareness of alarms is pushed to them.
 
The clear benefit of this type of monitoring, over manual inspections and centralized monitoring alone, is that crew members can respond to temperature deviations in minutes – not hours. The effect of a faster response means conditions that may damage, or diminish, perishable cargo is limited.
 
System redundancy is critical for operational design to ensure temperature deviations are managed. The opportunity for a layered approach using manual inspections, centralized monitoring and wireless alerting exists with modern IoT wireless vessel networks. Using a layered approach, perishable quality and safety at sea is maximized.

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.

Today, WMS’ IoT at Sea solution can support multiple refrigerated, dry and cargo devices on a single wireless vessel network for company-owned and guest containers through vessel sharing agreements (VSAs). Wireless Maritime Services’ vessel network is fully integrated with leading telematics platforms - including Carrier Transicold’s LynxFleet and Globe Tracker’s GT Sense. WMS has certified other leading telematics devices to work with our vessel network sending data from the vessel to their proprietary telematics cloud platforms. Our standards-based cellular IoT vessel network does not require a dedicated, vessel-only roaming arrangement, or private SIM (Subscriber Identity Module), and can support any standard machine-to-machine roaming agreement from any telematics provider.

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.

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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.