ITTC Project

Rail Sensor Testbed Program: Active Agents in Containers for Transport Chain Security

Project Award Date: 07-03-2007

Description

ITTC research aims to improve rail security over trade lanes from Mexico to an inland port at Kansas City. This effort will focus on transporter identification, sensing; real-time monitoring, tracking; safety and compliance; and integration of local, state, and federal information. The research will fundamentally change the current centralized model to more of a distributed one, which better represents the current reality. The distributed model is based on making the objects being transported active agents in their own security. Research will leverage the application of effective container sealing, e.g., using advanced RFID technologies; sensing, specifically those currently deployed as part of SensorNet; monitoring/tracking, e.g., applying new radio technologies; coupled with information management, e.g., an information clearing house with appropriate access controls. A prototype will be deployed in a rail sensor testbed environment. The hypothesis of this research is that endowing physical objects with the ability to determine and communicate their sense of security through consistency of information, combined with sensor observations of their environment, will in this case lead to increased security of the container transport chain; however the proposed new paradigm would be suitable in any case where an object needs to have a sense of its own security.

Investigators

Faculty Investigator(s): Victor Frost, Joseph Evans (PI), Gary Minden, Costas Tsatsoulis, Victor Frost (PI)

Student Investigator(s): Hongliang Fei, Daniel Fokum, Ruoyi Jiang, Martin Kuehnhausen

Project Sponsors

Primary Sponsor(s): Office of Naval Research