Optimal Communications Systems and Network Design for Cargo Monitoring

In the United States there is an emerging trend to ship goods by rail directly from ports to inland intermodal traffic terminals. However, for this trend to succeed shippers must have “visibility” into rail shipments. In this research we seek to provide visibility into shipments through optimal placement of sensor and communication technology. We formally define the notion of visibility and then highlight the objectives of our study. We also provide a generalized description of an optimization problem that has been developed to determine optimal sensor locations. Several problems must be solved to enable cost-effective visibility into rail shipments. We break down these problems into tasks and discuss how they can be addressed. The expected result of the proposed research includes a model (or models) that predicts the system cost given an assignment of sensors to rail-based containers. This model can be used to determine cost-effective scenarios for deploying sensors to containers on a train, as well as the system trade-offs.