Jun 08, 2016Trailiner, a U.S refrigerated goods carrier, recently announced that it is employing radio frequency identification to prevent loading and transportation errors, while saving the cost of manning its yard gate 24 hours a day. The RFID system, provided by QuikQ, lets Trailiner manage yard access and prevent trailer loading and transportation errors using the same QuikQ RFID tags that its drivers utilize to refuel their trucks at stations owned by Love's Travel Stops & Country Stores, an Oklahoma-based company that operates a chain of more than 370 truck stops and convenience stores located in 40 states.
Trailiner provides refrigerated shipping services in 48 states. Its fleet of 200 tractors and 300 trailers hauls commodities ranging from produce and groceries to pharmaceuticals and retail goods. The company operates an active storage yard in Springfield, Mo., at which tractors come and go seven days a week, 24 hours a day, to pick up or drop off reefer units (refrigerated trailers).
Around 2005, Trailiner began seeking technology that would provide security at its entry and exit gates, after a trailer loaded with goods was stolen from a nearby company's yard. Trailiner has staff onsite at all times, but did not want to hire an individual to sit at the gate 24 hours a day, so it turned to a solution dependent on active RFID tags to provide gate security. That system, installed in 2006, consisted of an active RFID tag attached to the interior of each truck's windshield, as well as readers at the entrance and exit gates to read those tags and, when appropriate, open the gate to allow a tractor to enter or leave. Trailiner also attached active tags to the tops of its trailers, so the company knew which goods were being removed from the yard at any given time. In addition, active tags were attached to the vehicles of all other logistics providers that visited its trailer yard.
In 2013, Love's began installing QuikQ's RFID-enabled Fuel Purchase System (FPS) at its stations to automate truck drivers' access to fuel pumps (see Love's Tries RFID for Automating Fuel Payments). Around that same time, Trailiner was experiencing the failure of many of its active RFID security gate tags due to batteries running out of power. The tags were fully sealed and, therefore, had to be discarded once their batteries died. Determining which tags had dead batteries and then replacing those tags was a major undertaking, says Amber Edmondson, Trailiner's president. In addition, she says, replacing active tags—which cost $24 to $30 apiece—was expensive, whereas a passive UHF tag costs about a dollar.
Many trucks' windshields already had a large number of stickers and other RFID tags on then, including those used for toll collection, and Trailiner preferred not to add to that clutter any more than necessary. So the company approached QuikQ to ascertain whether the existing passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tags used for fuel-dispensing could also be utilized for gate access as well.
With its Fuel Purchase System, QuikQ installs a single Impinj Speedway Revolution reader, along with two Invengo reader antennas, under the canopy of a fueling station at a Love's truck stop. As a truck pulls into the fuel lane, the reader antennas capture the unique ID number encoded to a QuikQ UHF RFID tag attached to the vehicle's windshield tag, then forwards that information to the Love's point-of-sale system. Once that truck is authorized, the FPS software activates the fuel pump.
QuikQ was able to leverage the same RFID technology used in QuikQ's fueling system for a solution know as Q-Gate, according to Vince Peschio, QuikQ's VP and CTO.
For Trailiner's yard-management deployment, QuikQ installed a single Speedway Revolution reader with two Invengo reader antennas at Trailiner's front gates. QuikQ provided its own UHF RFID tags, which Trailiner mounted to the windshields of its trucks and to the tops of its trailers. When a tractor and trailer arrive at the gate, the reader captures their tag ID numbers. Each tractor and trailer tag ID, as well as any related dispatch orders, are linked together in the Q-Gate software, which is integrated with Trailiner's own transportation-management system (TMS) software. The Q-Gate software then determines whether that particular truck and trailer are authorized to enter or leave, Peschio explains—and, if it is, the gate opens.
When a driver arrives to pick up a specific trailer, yard personnel tell the driver which trailer to take. Then, as he or she leaves with that trailer, the gate's RFID reader captures the tag IDs of both the tractor and the trailer, and the Q-Gate software captures and interprets the data and transmits it to Trailiner's own dispatch-management software, in order to determine whether the correct trailer has been collected. If the system captures the wrong trailer ID, the gate will not open and the driver will be directed to seek assistance from the yard staff onsite.
If a truck without an RFID tag were to sneak into the yard by following another vehicle equipped with a tag, Edmondson says, the driver would have a problem when it came time to exit, since he or she would be unable to open the gate to escape the yard.
The technology, Edmondson says, "gives us peace of mind." Although installing the new RFID reader at the gate was an expense the company had to incur, she notes, the cost of buying new passive tags was less than that of replacing the active tags it had previously been using.
The system not only allows automated access to the yard, but also enables Trailiner to identify which trucks and trailers enter or exit the facility. In the future, Edmondson says, Trailiner plans to use the collected data to alert maintenance crews when a vehicle requiring maintenance work, inspection or repairs enters the yard, so that they can immediately start providing services.
QuikQ is now offering the Q-Gate system to other trucking companies.
