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Information System for Agriculture and Food Research

Information platform of the Federal and State Governments

The intelligent container

Collaborative Project


Project code: 01IA10001
Contract period: 01.07.2010 - 30.06.2013
Coordinating institution: Institute for Microsensors, -actuators and -systems

The project consortium developes new approaches and technologies for innovative logistic processes in our project since 2010. The focuses of the applications are transports of foods which are sensitive to ambience parameter. The new approaches have the goal to reduce losses caused by spoilage of transported goods. This will lead to additional values for the affected companies, generate more food safety for consumers and reduce pollution. The ‘Intelligent Container’ stands for novel transport systems with the ability to measure, analyze and to intervene during transports by truck, rail, ship or plane. The common used technologies for logistics provide just a limited monitoring of parameters like temperature or humidity. For example, in the most cases temperature is just measured at two points in containers or trailers. This is not suitable for quality monitoring of the entire load, because the food quality can be affected by even small temperature gradients. An autonomous analysis of the measured parameters and an assignment of the data the load and its quality is also not possible today. All in all, the potential of innovative sensor and communication technologies is not used in food logistics. Thus, the possibilities for an increase of the efficiency logistic process, to reduce the loss of foods and to lower the CO2 emission are not taped. To implement novel technologies into logistic processes and to increase the process efficiency the project consortium develops new approaches and implements them practically. Our project objectives: - Improvement of the traceability of foods and realization of autonomous monitoring of the food quality during transport, - Prevention of unnecessary transports of goods and reduction of food losses, - Examination of the benefits of dynamic FEFO in practical applications and - Implementation of practical solutions and systems integration of new approaches into existing logistics processes and prove of benefit.

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Collaborative Projects

Development and application of innovative sensor systems

Application of cellular and satellite communications and wireless sensor networks

Implementation of intelligent computing and decision support systems and shelf life models

Integration into electronic data processing solutions and application of dynamic FEFO in real-world logistics processes

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