Nomadic Computing Towards Secure Cargo Transports

Abstract

Cargo crimes, most of it taking place in the supply chain between production and delivery, is today a major problem for the global transport industry. Today, the security around physical plants such as manufacturer plants, distribution centres, warehouses, etc., has been so well improved that cargo crimes within those plants have been very difficult to conduct. This circumstance has made that cargo thieves now have started to concentrate on cargo transports in transit to conduct their criminal activities.

Our research objective has been to investigate in how Nomadic Computing can support and increase the security of cargo transports in transit. We have defined nomadic computing as the ability to perform computing services from anywhere, anytime, and with an unlimited number of different mobile devices.

Furthermore, we have in cooperation with Schenker started to realize their vision of a mobility platform. Schenker’s goal with the platform is to provide more customer business value and strengthen their competitiveness. As an initial step towards this platform, has a system for trailer tracking been designed and developed. This system was aimed to increase the security level around trailers in transit. We have therefore performed an action case study in order to support Schenker with knowledge and practical work.

Our work has resulted into a conceptual architecture of the mobility platform with a strong focus in security services. We discovered that these services can generate benefits for security as well as increased productivity in the supply chain. We have also concluded that nomadic computing have the possibility to make significant improvements to the transportation process.