SBB Freight uses RFID technology to achieve real-time tracking of trucks
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Swiss rail freight operator SBB Cargo is equipping its entire freight fleet with radio frequency identification technology to monitor the fleet entering and exiting stations and warehouses. Before the deployment of the project, the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), the parent company of SBB Cargo, had deployed RFID technology on the passenger cars it operated.
By the end of this month, SBB Cargo is expected to attach tags to 1,000 of the 6,700 freight vehicles, and more than 5,000 vehicles will be deployed by the end of next year. The technology is provided by the Finnish RFID company Vilant, using Vilant’s own UHF RFID reader and durable Ironside tags from Confidex, allowing SBB Cargo and its customers to accurately identify when each vehicle enters and exits the site and its orders. This also makes the loading and unloading process of SBB freight easier, thereby preventing errors or delays in shipments.
(Tags are attached to both sides of each freight car)
SBB Freight is located in Olten, Switzerland, and distributes 175,000 tons of cargo within Switzerland every day. Goods are distributed between stations by rail cars, and cars are distributed between stations and warehouses. The tracking of cars and their movements is a very complicated process. At the same time, once you make a mistake, it will cause a lot of waste.
In the past, truck management has always been manual. People along the railway record the car license plate numbers with pen and paper, and then take them back to the office. The manual method is not only slow, but also takes time to bring to the office. This information is often delayed by hours or days.
Therefore, Christian Schmidt, Director of Asset Intelligence at SBB Freight, said that SBB is always looking for relevant technologies to improve this. Schmidt explained that RFID deployment is part of SBB’s freight automation plan. In addition to using RFID technology to identify the movement of each vehicle, the company also uses GPS and sensors to track the location, temperature, humidity and vibration levels of refrigerated vehicles. With the use of RFID systems, SBB freight dispatchers and customers can receive automatic reminders when each vehicle arrives at the station or terminal via email or text message. The automated means can effectively prevent errors, enhance competitiveness and safety.
SBB Cargo began searching for suitable RFID technology a year ago and finally chose the Vilant system. Since then, the company has been conducting tests to determine the best label placement and label type. Verena Dickmann, Vilant’s project engineer, said that the tags will eventually be attached to the sides of each car.
The unique ID number bound to each tag is bound to the corresponding car type and serial number, and is stored in the SBB freight software. SBB Cargo has installed RFID readers at multiple stations and waterways. These devices can read cars traveling at 150 kilometers per hour.
The management software of SBB Freight starts to store data such as the owner of the goods. The RFID tag binds the car ID, so every time the car passes through the card reader, the software will update the car and its cargo information.
When the tagged freight car passes the reader, the device captures each unique tag ID number and sends that data to a cloud-based server. Then, Vilant’s train analyzer software will interpret the tag information and transfer the data to the back-end database. In addition, the program also installs motion sensors to detect cars without RFID tags.
Schmidt said: “Fast reading capability is the main value of RFID. I think this is the first step of our plan. We will connect different data sources and allow different customers to use the data.”
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