Monitoring Facility

• Real-time visibility into exact locations of high value shipments and cargo has never been as important as today with increased movement of assets, the need to move them quickly to final destinations, and new security requirements. Today’s GT System portable wireless sensor technology provides critical visibility into supply chain activities, delivering benefits to carriers, shippers, and customers.

• ASPS Provides the GT   portable sensor product solution that identifies environmental conditions, physical threats, security conditions, asset monitoring, and locations in specific enclosure. The Company differentiates itself from competition by deploying a proprietary (unique) portable sensor. In the world of international threats and domestic commerce, security inspection and tracking of personal and physical property face more challenges than ever before. Governments and commercial businesses must identify a growing number of harmful threats to protect lives and valuable assets.

• The GT system will combine requirements for safety and security. Built exclusively with U.S. BioSensors Inc.’s technologies, the GT system can allow officials to monitor shipment traffic by combining database knowledge with real-time sensor input.

• ASPS monitors and manages physical assets and information flows. A dispatcher control system combines cargo status and tracking technology with wireless sensor communication technology to enable deployed shipments to be monitored and assisted while on the move.

• More particularly, GT units are deployed with the shipment. The units include sensor specific information and location tracking technology with GPS and wireless communication technology.

• The GT devices communicate via the wireless communication technology to a control system. The control system maintains a database of information about various thresholds, shipping orders, statuses, or conditions. In response to status based events, the GT devices communicate with the control system to obtain and update information regarding the status and sends messages via e-mail, text, or cellular if an event is triggered.

• The GT application runs periodically, based on a frequency that the shippers specifies. When the application runs, it calls the server to get the current location for all users by passing an array of aliases and then determines which users are within the shipper’s criteria.

• There are two ways to determine whether a user is within the GT parameters:

• Save the latitude and longitude of all users' current positions in the user database and then perform a proximity search to find only the users who are within the shipper's criteria. This method requires a stored procedure for the user database that performs a proximity search.

• After the application determines which users are within the criteria, GT send an alert message to ASPS. Finally, the application updates the flag in the user database to indicate which users have received the SMS message for the day.

1. Monitoring a shipment in real time can identify holds or ‘hang time’.
2. Identifying recurring ‘hang time’ and taking it out of the supply chain can improve efficiency.
3. A saving of 5% or 3.5 days on a regular trip would mean one less shipment in 20 days.
4. A lost or delayed shipment can quickly be identified and remedial action taken to ensure supply continuity.
5. The problems of identifying responsibility or proof of an insurance claim means insurance companies are either not keen to insure a cargo or charge a very high premium.
6. Monitoring and being able to provide an audit trail of the shipment will allow insurability and cost savings.

• GT Benefits

• Successful deployments of GT freight technologies yield three types of benefits: 1) private sector, 2) public sector, and 3) freight network.

• Private Sector Benefits

• Improved reliability and service are other private-sector benefits that help users of freight transportation services. Better schedule adherence, speed, and operational flexibility translate into inventory management and customer service-related benefits.

• The private sector also benefits from enhanced shipment and service integrity, which apply to both freight system users and providers.

• Public Sector Benefits

• By smoothing traffic flows around major shipping hubs, intelligent freight technologies can deliver tangible environmental and quality-of-life benefits and help increase the effective capacity of transportation infrastructure. Public agencies also derive direct efficiency and productivity benefits from successful deployments. For example, state highway enforcement agencies can increase the number of trucks that an inspector processes in an hour, and customs officials can screen more inbound shipments and cross-border trailers. Successful deployment of these technologies can yield significant safety benefits as well. Some technologies permit agencies to focus their enforcement attention on problem areas, yielding proportionally greater benefits. The Hazmat FOT also reported better emergency response, as evaluators found that rapid notification of incidents could lower environmental mitigation costs and potential public exposure to these releases. Finally, the public sector could benefit from intelligent freight technologies in the area of national security. To the degree intelligent freight technologies enhance security against terrorism, they contribute to the society as a whole.

• Freight Network Benefits

• Freight network benefits are qualitatively different than the intelligent freight technology benefits discussed above; the focus shifts from results achieved by individual firms and projects to large-scale system impacts. Higher quality, lower cost transportation services deliver the most important network benefits when they affect other industries and, through them, the economy as a whole.

• The key to realizing network benefits is to enable industries that depend on freight transportation to produce the same amount of goods and services for less. In response to freight transportation improvements, industries can change how much it costs to produce goods from the input cost of raw materials to the cost of finished product delivery. Better freight networks can stimulate advantageous shifts in demand and supply curves for goods and services—an improved freight network thus generates economic growth and greater prosperity. Recent history illustrates the potential value of such shifts; since 1980, transportation and logistics improvements freed up seven percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product—a benefit worth about $650 billion to the economy in 2007 alone.