If I only had a brain
As airlines increasingly farm out their ULD management duties to third parties, these outsourcing companies have made some of the greatest recent strides in creating smarter ULDs.
Unilode, which this month will begin managing and maintaining containers and pallets for Saudia and Saudia Cargo in Jeddah and Riyadh, has become one of the leading proponents of the digitization of the ULD container.
“This is an incredibly exciting time for the business,” said Unilode president and CEO, Dr. Ludwig Bertsch, who spoke at last month’s WCS conference about the company’s interactive ULD track-and-trace system. While small sensory devices implanted within the containers can make ULDs “smart,” the real intelligence of the system comes through interactivity with not just the human users but other stakeholders in the supply chain.
While Unilode technicians are monitoring the ULD sensors – which can fit in the palm of a hand and have batteries that last five years – the ULDs themselves are communicating with forwarders, warehouse operators and load-and-balance systems, Bertsch said. The ULDs are also communicating with each other as well as with ground tugs, aircraft and shippers, and can send instant alerts via mobile apps about changes in cargo temperature, location, shock, tampering or chain of custody.
“Everyone benefits when an item is able to track its whereabouts and condition autonomously and passes this information on to a backbone where we can all see it,” Bertsch explained. “The item that is being tracked is what generates the transactional supply chain information, not the human being generating the transaction. Human intervention becomes necessary only when alerts are generated, as opposed to having to make sense of masses of data without an immediately obvious context.”
In a similar way, tracking software developed by Jettainer, another leading international supplier for outsourced ULD management, is beginning to make it possible for ULD crews to make predictions about where to send certain ULDs to meet demand, based on real-time and historical data.
The intelligent control software, called the Decision Support System (DSS), has been under development between Jettainer and the University of Cologne, and was recently named a finalist in IATA’s Air Cargo Innovation Award competition for 2017, said Martin Kraemer, head of marketing and public relations at Jettainer.
Jettainer’s ULDs are fitted with an increasing amount of digital technology in order to transmit a constant stream of information regarding their position, status and temperature, Kraemer said. As a wholly owned subsidiary of Lufthansa Cargo, Jettainer is currently responsible for the management of about 90,000 ULDs for 24 airlines, operating at more than 450 airports around the world. With so many types and sizes of ULDs, the outsourcer would have a hard time tracking the ever-changing regional demand for ULDs across the globe without its DSS software.
“By avoiding empty flights and overcapacities, our system already contributes to making air cargo more resource-saving and sustainable,” he said. “The system can make suggestions, [but] the ULD controller remains the one making the last decision.” The system can reduce working time for standard and basic ULD steering tasks, leaving more time for more complex tasks and decisions, but alternative routes and scheduling scenarios are made available within a matter of seconds as support for ULD controllers, he said.
Logistics IT firm CHAMP Cargosystems has also been active in the ULD space for the last decade, most recently launching its ULD Manager application to support operations at Hong Kong-based ULD Partner, which handles supply, repair and maintenance services for the 13,000 ULDs operated by client Air China Cargo. Operating across more than 80 airports, CHAMP’s ULD Manager provides visibility of all equipment movements, airport inventories and equipment stock levels for the client. ULD Manager can also alert ULD Partner’s support teams if certain situations arise, such as excess or low station stock or incompatible movements are detected.
“We needed a system that could provide full control and visibility of all ULDs operating within and beyond our client airline’s networks,” said Angel Cheung, ULD Partner’s general manager. Also, the system had to be “functionally rich,” easy to use and fully scalable for all of ULD Partner’s clients of various sizes.