Maritime logistics and applications of information technologies

Due to the globalization, international logistics becomes to rely more on the maritime transportation than ever before. This presentation discusses various research issues in field of maritime logistics and various cases of applications of IT to container terminals. The issues include port logistics, container transportation, and maritime transportation systems. Various research topics on the optimization of maritime logistics are introduced in more detail, including topics on the design and operation container terminals, empty container management, the design and operation of container transportation systems. Some approaches to solve the problems, which have been developed in Korea, will be introduced. We also introduce the case of investigating new pervasive computing technologies of RFID, RTLS, and mesh networking for improving the efficiency of container port terminals. Unfortunately, container terminal is a harsh environment in which wireless communication would be unstable. To address these challenges, a case of developing the mesh network protocol based real time locating system is introduced for building smart container terminal management. For collecting real-time information of RFID tags, RTLS tags, and sensor tags, it is required to implement an integrated middleware platform which is mainly used to realize synchronization of port logistics. It will be shown that a new breakthrough of optimizing the port logistics can be achieved for realizing smart container terminals with the help of the integrated middleware platform for supporting RFID, RTLS, and sensor tags altogether.