The DASH7 Alliance, an industry consortium promoting a standard for wireless sensor networks, has started a new initiative for container security and sensing aimed at addressing the need for interoperability among container security devices.
The DASH7 Alliance was created earlier this year to promote the ISO 18000-7 wireless data standard, which is already in use by the Defense Department and many allied militaries around the world, to track container shipments using active radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. Now the alliance is looking at likely “referencing” an existing ISO standard that relates to sensors and takes advantage of optimal ways to collect data inside a container, whether it’s monitoring for intrusion or something else, Patrick Burns, president of the DASH7 Alliance and the head of licensing for Savi Technology, a business unit of Lockheed Martin [LMT], tells TR2.
There are a lot of companies developing and selling technologies and solutions for the fledgling container security market but for the most part they are doing their own thing.
The new Container Security and Sensing Initiative “does, I think, bring a lot of sanity to what is otherwise a rather messy marketplace around container security devices,” Burns says. “There’s a whole bunch of stuff going on out there and we think it’s at the wrong frequency, or it’s proprietary or it’s being implemented in sort of a science fiction, fantastic sort of way that doesn’t jibe with reality.”
One of the drivers behind the initiative is the Defense Department, which purchase container and cargo tracking solutions based on active RFID technology from Savi and other vendors. But DoD is also looking at container security and related sensors and needs industry to come up with more standardized ways of promoting this, Burns says.
More and more the Defense Department and international Ministries of Defense are looking to commercial carriers for logistics help so these carriers and third party logistics providers need to pay attention to what DoD wants. DoD is a “key link, but not the only link, to encouraging commercial adoption of DASH7,” Burns says. In addition to the U.S. and international Defense Departments, certain countries such as China, Korea and even Japan are also driving interest in container security for reasons such as Green Lanes and customs revenue collections, he adds.
Burns says that if the DASH7 Alliance is successful in getting industry to agree to a sensor standard that integrates well with 18000-7 that will show the Department of Homeland Security that “industry is banding together around a technology” that the Defense Department has committed. In turn, he expects that DHS would be more “proactive in the future” in working issues related to container security.
As for when the DASH7 Alliance may be able to agree on a sensor standard, Burns says this should only take a few months given that a new standard wouldn’t be created.
Members of the DASH7 Alliance include Analog Devices [ADI], Austria Microsystems, Dow Chemical [DOW], Hi-G- Tek, Lockheed Martin, France’s Michelin, Northrop Grumman [NOC], Texas Instruments [TI] and others.