A Study of the SMART Container Monitoring System in the Ocean Shipping Industry

Abstract

There are more than 146,172,823 TEUs containers handled through the top ten container ports in 2006. With such a large amount of container throughput, how to accurately read the container I.D. at the gate during their entering into and leaving from a container yard is a major issue. An appropriate monitoring system can not only improve the yard’s operation efficiency but also reduce the yard’s operation cost. There are two types of technology currently employed to help identify the container external markings with detailed cargo information, namely, (1) Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and (2) Radio Frequency Identification Tag (RFID). According to the author’s knowledge, there is no academic study to compare the cost and benefit of the two container monitoring technologies systematically. This research employed the AHP methodology to find out the major criteria influence the container yards’ monitoring system selection decision by distributing AHP expert questionnaires to major stakeholders in the ocean container shipping industry in Taiwan. The initial finding indicates using an OCR system could result in a higher benefit /cost ratio, which means OCR is perceived to be the better container monitoring systems by most of the major carriers in Taiwan.