Tracking system for supply chain visibilty, reporting on temperature, vibrations, and humidity of shipments

Omnia Service Italia Srl has developed a prototyped software solution enabling autonomous tracking conditions, safety and location of shipments equipped with IoT devices, while in transit from the manufacturer to the destination.

Indeed, the mentioned IoT devices are radio frequency identification (RFID) tags provided with sensors for monitoring vibrations and shocks, temperature, and humidity (VTH). Therefore, they are useful for tracking fall events, impacts, temperature or humidity levels out of reference range, and position of parcels on which these RFID tags are applied.

Such data provides the involved stakeholders (producers, carriers, customers) with valuable knowledge and information about the entirety, safety and status (i.e. broken/safe) of the shipped parcels at each delivery step. These meaningful data allow managers to take corrective measures or define the responsibilities.

Automatization is at the key feature of this innovation, manual package inspection can be avoided, the chance of missing parcels minimized, and the falsification of goods significantly reduced.

Additional elements of novelty are the threshold values for various types of goods and parameters (VTH) monitored. These thresholds have to be assessed by producers, and trusted both by carriers, and insurance companies. The threshold assessment and validation will be a stage requiring support and expertise about the shipments, which the selected partner is expected to bring. In particular, the company is looking for:

• industrial manufacturers or freight forwarders interested in investing in this technology under technical cooperation agreement

• industrial manufacturers or freight forwarders willing to apply for EU fundings, to develop and implement the proposed solution.

The partner company may be interested in tracing only one parameter or the whole set of data (vibrations and shocks, temperature), as well as it may propose to trace a different additional variable (assuming that suitable sensors for the required measure will be commercially available).

The ideal partner is a company which is manufacturing, handling, managing, or carrying critical, fragile, or dangerous products like: musical instruments, artworks, antiques goods, paintings, electronic components and electrical circuits, sensors and chips, ADR-dangerous-goods, luxury goods, drugs, medicines and vaccines, expensive food, lens and optical instruments. The ideal partner is expected to implement the proposed solution in order to track position and monitor VTH parameters of the produced/carried parcels.