Press Report

(Business Geomatics 07.2007) The reason why you can find good quality German apples in the supermarket in spring is due to the fact that apples and pears get stored in a so-called "controlled atmosphere". In the transport sector it is also highly important to observe temperature limits consistently in the cold chain when it comes to perishable food like seasonal fruit, meat and fish. This requirement has become even more important since 2005 when the EU-regulation 178/2002 came into force. This regulation binds all supply chain partners who work in the food industry to ensure the complete retraceability of their products.

For doing so radio frequency identification (RFID) gets used by means of which transponder data can be read and stored without touching the transponders. In combination with a data logger that saves temperature data which were measured by sensors it is thus possible to document temperature changes during the entire transport. In this way it shall be possible to monitor cold chains also beyond company borders.

According to inet-logistics, the provider of software solutions, the goal is to guarantee the complete shipment monitoring and thus record the status of goods during the entire transport. inet-logistics has the necessary software for it, namely the "logistics-server”. According to manufacturer information, this programme plans and monitors all transports within logistics networks. The so-called loading device management which is part of this solution makes loading device stocks and transactions transparent.

inet-logistics has examined in the course of a pilot project the use of RFID for the cold chain control. The project was carried out together with the research institute VResearch, Identec Solutions, the manufacturer of active RFID-components, and the logistics service provider Gebrüder Weiss. In the process, temperature sensitive goods were equipped with RFID-tags during the loading. The new RFID-components for the logistics-server by inet-logistics, the so-called shipment localisation kits, are the result of the project.