TRAXENS seeks to make its container-tracking technology an industry standard.
Visitors attending the inauguration of the CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin at the Port of Long Beach in February got an up-close look at the future of container shipping in the United States.
With nominal capacity of 17,859 TEUs, it was hard not to be impressed by both the ship and the challenges U.S. terminals will face servicing this giant and its five sister ships when they begin operating in a transpacific loop this May.
Also large are the ambitions of the technology company TRAXENS, whose chief executive officer and founder Michel Fallah was on hand for the inauguration.
TRAXENS aims to transform those containers being carried by CMA CGM and other carriers into “smart containers” by adding monitoring devices that not only track their location anywhere in the world, but also provide insight into the condition of their contents. That information can then be supplied to the ocean carrier and other participants throughout the supply chain.
Sensors in smart boxes can provide information on the temperature, humidity, and amount of carbon dioxide inside a container; when and where the doors of the container have been opened; and whether the container has been subjected to unusual shocks or vibrations. Pressure gauges on tank containers could report their readings to the TRAXENS monitor device, and information on customs clearance status could also be reported. In addition, the devices could be set up for two-way communication so that, for example, temperature in a reefer container might be adjusted up or down.
Fallah predicted “within three years you will have the container and the dumb container—because the smart container in three years will become the standard.” He said his company will have 100,000 smart containers by the end of this year in use.
Fallah’s company is then hoping to benefit from a “huge pop” in the number of smart containers entering service.
“It makes no sense to target one container or some thousands of containers, because nobody is going to seek a TRAXENS container to put it in the loop,” he said. Instead, he added, the entire industry needs to be transformed.
CMA CGM bought into the vision after following TRAXENS’s progress for three years. At the moment, the liner carrier owns 23 percent of the company, but Tim Baker, director of marketing and communications at TRAXENS, emphasized “It is not a CMA CGM solution… Their needs are not different from others. We are perfectly free to sell to other shipping lines and we are very actively doing that right now.”
TRAXENS wants to make its product a market standard.
TRAXENS, like CMA CGM, is based in Marseilles, France, and has attracted investment from a number of other French investors. In February 2015 the company announced in addition to CMA CGM that CAAP Création (part of the Crédit Agricole Group) and S.C.R. Provençale et Corse (BPPC Group) had provided it with start-up capital and was awarded 2 million euros ($2.2 million) from the Innovation 2030 Worldwide Innovation Challenge by French President Francoise Hollande. Last fall TRAXENS also received a 1.5-million-euro investment from the venture fund Tertium.
Baker explained that the company has done three things to make its vision of smart containers a reality: 1.) sharply reduced the hardware cost to track containers; 2.) created what it calls TRAX-HUB, a scalable platform that can handle the information generated by millions of smart containers; and 3.) established a business model that pays for the deployment of the technology.
“We do hardware, but hardware is only a means to the end,” Baker said. “Our business is selling data, but that data right now does not exist in the shipping industry.”
Baker said while solutions for tracking containers have existed for about a decade, they remain expensive, costing hundreds of dollars per box, and don’t work well in the harsh marine environment.
TRAXENS has developed a device that can attach to the exterior of existing containers, and eventually the company foresees them being added to newly manufactured containers at an even lower cost.
Baker said one of the biggest elements of cost is not the hardware itself but the logistics of having to change batteries. Even if container-tracking devices were free, “if you had to change the batteries in and out every week, it would cost an arm and a leg. So it’s not the cost of the hardware, it’s how autonomous can you make it,” he added.
The company’s devices incorporate “mesh radio” technology. Instead of the DASH7 protocol, the company uses its own TRAX-NET protocol, which Baker said is “designed specifically for the container-shipping environment: Lots of metal, moisture, big yards, power-sharing needed between devices on adjacent containers.”
Baker said TRAXENS guarantees its devices will have at least a three-year battery life, and the modeling it has done indicates the devices could last five to 10 years without a battery change, depending on how they are used.
“We have other things in the pipe that will push the envelope,” he said.
Like Honey Bees. The TRAXENS logo includes a honey bee, and the company’s tracking units are designed to work together like social insects—transmitting information between each other using low power over the TRAX-NET.
Information bounces from container to container through the network, something that Baker said makes sense given that containers generally spend so much time together either on ships or in terminals.
With TRAX-NET the containers “create a cluster automatically and send all their information through the one container which has got the best GSM (global system for mobile communications) signal strength and the best battery life, and basically you’re saving 99 percent of energy compared with 100 containers all communicating by themselves,” he said.
The devices can also communicate through equipment located aboard ships or at terminals and can automatically change radio frequencies or power strength as required by different national regulations.
The company has tested the technology on both the CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin and CMA CGM Bougainville.
“What costs energy is to hook up to the network and sign off from the network. The actual energy for the data transmission is very, very small. It’s not going to cost a great deal more to transmit the data from 100 containers then it would from one container,” Baker said.
Because data “hops from container to container, it allows us to reach containers even if they are right at the bottom of the hold with dozens and dozens of other containers on top.
“If we’re going low cost on the hardware, then we are talking about millions of containers—we are not looking to equip 1,000 containers at a time,” he said.
But he added, getting a low-cost piece of hardware is not enough, because “when the data comes up, you need to get it to the right people. So you need a big data platform which is capable of handling all those containers with all those users looking for data.”
Baker said the TRAX-HUB platform was built mainly by Jacques DeLort, vice president of strategic marketing and information technology and previously the chief information officer at CMA CGM, and was in charge of the computing project for the aborted P3 alliance that CMA CGM had hoped to form with Maersk and
Mediterranean Shipping Co.
DaaS Or SaaS. TRAXENS plans to provide two types of services, both data-as-a-service (DaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS).
With DaaS, customers can have direct access to status information on their cargo or equipment, while with SaaS, TRAXENS will provide access to applications allowing customers to optimize their operations.
“Information is provided in near real-time on all planned or exceptional events that occur during the life cycle of a shipment,” the company said.
A challenge facing a company like TRAXENS, which is trying to create a container-tracking system, is “Who’s going to pay for it? Who’s going to use it? And how do you make out that someone in the middle of the value chain finds himself either squeezed out or in a position to block the whole system?” Baker said. “The person who benefits is not necessarily the person who has to pay for the infrastructure, and so on.”
Shipping lines naturally have a need to track containers when they are on board a vessel, in a terminal, or between shippers and consignees.
Today, Baker said this is a “tremendously manual task and if they know what’s happening to each container when it’s full or empty then they can improve their efficiency. So that is an in-house reason to do it”
But he said beneficial cargo owners also need information on the location and condition of their containers so they can track their shipments from door to door, whether the box is under the control of the ocean carrier, a freight forwarder or other intermediary.
TRAXENS can provide real-time data, which comes directly from the container, and without the need for linking lots of information systems.
The company plans to sell data subscriptions to carriers such as CMA CGM, which has already signed up for a considerable number of them. The subscriptions will be priced at a cost that makes it worthwhile to the carrier to convert its containers into smart boxes.
Those carrier subscriptions will not cover the entire cost of making each container a “smart box,” but by selling information to other participants in the supply chain, Baker said “We can make the difference and a bit more.”
Baker said the company did not want to discuss pricing specifically for this
story.
“They are not totally fixed yet and the range of services is so large that a price without the corresponding service does not really have much meaning,” he added. “I know that many people would like to know concrete information on prices, but it’s too early right now.”
He noted prices will vary according to a number factors, including what trade the container is in, whether the container is a dry or refrigerated box, how much data it receives, and whether there is a need for two-way communication with the containers.
“This is inevitably going to mean better control of inventories and costs. There is value in knowing what is going on for shippers,” he said.
Fallah said that for security purposes, the shipper can also control which of its partners gets certain information.
“There’s a lot of data which needs to be controlled and what our platform does is give the right information to the right people and protects the right information as well,” Baker said.
He also said once smart containers become common, carriers will be able to use the information that is generated to get a “big data vision” of their supply chain—identifying bottlenecks, or where turn-times are fastest, for example, or locations where containers are subjected to rough handling, and the exact location and time of thefts. n
Making ‘smart boxes’
