Walton: Good morning.

Audience: Good morning.

Walton: My name is Mike Walton and I’d like to welcome each and everyone of you this workshop on Intermodal Freight Identification Technology: Current Applications and Future Needs. One of the most prevailing questions which you may have at this particular point, and I should put that to rest immediately is the dress code. This is business casual in Texas.

Audience: [Laughter]

Walton: If it was really dress, I’d have my boots on but I didn’t bring them.

Audience: [Laughter]

Walton: No, the dress code is business casual and we have a number of guest coming in and out today to speak to us and be with for a short period of time as many of you know T21 is being signed today and consequently that’s a major events and we have several people participating in that activity so I’m dressed for them – you are dressed appropriately. Most of you, if you look around, can be as comfortable as you would like to be – just as long as no one brings out scissors and starts cutting ties we will be alright.

You are very important to the success of this program. This workshop came together after a extended period of discussions, deliberations and interactions and I would hope that as you look about the room and as you visit during the workshop period that you will note that you’re meeting a number of new people. People, perhaps you have not worked with previously, but will add to the strength of the program that we have. We are truly talking about a systems approach to this issue, not specifically modal issues, but cross cutting issues in this very challenging and rapidly moving topic. As you look at your program, you will notice that it is organized primarily with some keynote addresses and thought provoking discussions on major freight identification programs and touching. A number of areas and activities are identified that will help us frame the discussion that takes place in the breakout groups. In the five breakout groups that begin this afternoon, we will go through in much more detail about those and the ground rules. Let me say at the outset. We have an extremely talented group of facilitators and recorders. The key to this the success of this program is your activity and your effort to bring the workshop together with an action agenda and some recommendations that will hopefully frame the next stage of initiatives both short, medium and long term. The recommendations are clearly yours – there is no hidden agenda. This is clearly an open process where the results are up to you and the deliberations that take place. I will come back later and discuss in more detail the process that we intend to follow. The results of the survey are also included in your package.

Let me move to the initial opening discussion. We are very fortunate to have with us, this morning, Federal Highway Administrator, Ken Wykle. Many of you know that Administrator Wykle is completing his seventh month as the fourteenth administrator of the Federal Highway Administration and as many of you know, as well, he has a long and distinguished military career during which time he served as Deputy Commander in Chief of U.S. TRANSCOM – the military transportation command which is the military’s unified management group for the army military traffic management command and navy military movement command and the airforce air mobility command. During that period of time in his career in the Army, he commanded a medium truck company in Viet Nam, and later taught military logistics and operations. Since 1995, and prior to assuming his current position as administrator, he was Vice President of Defense Transportation with SAIC or Science Application International Corporation. I would quote Secretary (of Transportation) Slater as the confirmation in stating that Administrator Wykle is a "visionary leader who will continue our focus on safety, efficiency, economic growth and the opportunity for all Americans. His leadership management in Intermodal Transportation experience will be powerful forces in shaping the future of our highways as we meet the challenges of the twenty-first century." Please join me in welcoming Administrator Ken Wykle.

Wykle: Well thanks very much Mike, I am certainly pleased to be here this morning and as I have mentioned to a couple of you in the hallway, I am not sure why I’m here after looking around and seeing the audience because I feel like I am preaching to the choir. We have been at many of these conferences and sessions before talking about this and other subjects. But I certainly thank each of you for coming today and joining in this conference to talk about intermodalism and freight movement technology and the preparation that you have done for this workshop. It is my understanding that the planning actually started back in October, 1997, between ten industry organizations, the Department of Defense, Department of Treasury, and the Department of Transportation. There are many industry groups represented here today and we certainly appreciate each of you coming. A couple groups who are not here labor and representatives of the shippers – they were invited but they just could not make it. I think it is important that we continually reach out to make sure that every member of the community is invited to these and has the opportunity to attend.

I am really delighted to have the opportunity to kick off this conference and provide some ideas or perhaps challenges for you to think about as we proceed during the day. We certainly have all the right people here. I am glad you have taken the time from your busy schedule to attend this workshop, certainly to roll up your sleeves, so that we can work together on common problems. The Department of Transportation is pleased to sponsor this event bringing together a diverse group of both public and proud organizations. We have the rail, highway, the air, the sea and waterway representatives here today. Also represented are intermodal carriers, third party shippers, port or terminal operators as well as the department of defense, department of transportation, treasury and every state agencies and municipal planning organizations.

Here is a brief review about what some of the organizations represented here are doing with tagging and tracking systems. But this will not be new to many of you, but toll authorities are using electronic tagging devices to allow patrons to pay there tolls without stopping. This market has been steadily building over the last ten years. Trucking companies have been using tagging devices for tolls, for fleet management purposes, gate access systems, and now they are using tags for electronic clearance. They are using global positioning systems for fleet management and tracking purposes. I’m leaving later on this afternoon to go out to Omaha to kick off a program we are starting with Warner Trucking. They are going to be using global positioning systems to track the hours of service for their drivers. So we’re partnering with them to eliminate the manual logbook that truckers currently use. Just a little aside – the Department of Transportation regulations add up to 53 man years of paperwork that we place on the trucking industry for manual logbooks, drug testing and alcohol testing. If we can eliminate some of that or reduce it, we can have a significant fact on improving productivity and the bottom line. So this is the program to start doing that and start eliminating some of this paperwork. Railroads, as you probably know, started out using bar coding, but since that time they have tagged their rolling stock and they track some of the containers that are equipped with tagged devices to know where they are and to keep track of their assets. Port terminals experimented with tagging devices for storing and retrieving containers, but much of that has changed and not enough containers are tagged to make storing or retrieving systems cost effective. But instead many terminals are either using or experimenting with imaging systems for storing or retrieving containers as well as for gate access systems. Military operations have been using a variety of bar coding and tagging technology. Their requirements cover intransit visibility as well as warehouse storage and retrieval. With significant use of commercial shipping, the military must be more reliant of the technologies designed for non-military operations.

The theme of this workshop is harmonization of freight identification technology. We are here to discuss the harmonization of freight tagging and tracking technologies in ways to achieve integrated transportation systems and minimizing the disruption of freight movements. I didn’t say standardization and I didn’t say they all have to look the same. But for each of us to do the required work, we may have to work more closely together to ensure that we don’t cause interference and find the common areas that we can work together on. Harmonization may mean a number of things to many of you. There are a number or words that are often used to describing harmonization – like standards, compatibility, interoperability. To me, the real big prize is the toughest to achieve – interoperability. Standards can get you compatible systems, but not necessarily systems that work together. For example, two tolls roads or bridges can use identical electronic toll systems. But unless they have a policy and a toll fund settlement agreement in place, a truck will need two identical tags to pay tolls on both roads. We don’t have interoperability. To me, harmonization is about making progress toward interoperability. It includes standards but it also includes business processes. It offers opportunities and challenges.

What needs to be harmonized? I’ll kind of give you my shortcut version of the issues. There are others who will follow me today who will give more detail on their specific responsibility. You may want to be listening to what is being said by each of these individual speakers to see if you hear remarks about linkages between diverse information systems. Electronic tolling is one of the most visible signs of electronic tagging technology. There are an estimated four million tags in use out in the market place. The highest concentration of tolls is at the Northeast. The toll authorities in Northeast had a vision, they had the foresight to develop an interagency agreement between seven toll authorities and states of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania to all purchase interoperable equipment for electronic toll collection. They now have two million users of those tagging systems. As the interoperability of electronic tolling begins to manifest its benefits in these seven authorities, we see other opportunities or needs for interoperability. Let me share some of these with you. What started out as a regional agreement in three states is now being looked on with interest by the Peace Bridge border crossing and several other states on the eastern seaboard. The Peace Bridge connects Buffalo, New York with Fort Yeary, Ontario. It also connects the New York State throughway with the Queen Elizabeth’s Way, both limited access highways. The truck routes serving the eastern seaboard from Toronto and Detroit. FHWA is currently a partner on a ITS project with the Piece Bridge to demonstrate the multiple applications of tagging technologies with toll, commercial vehicle operations, and customers purposes. Although the Peace Bridge would like to partner with the interagency agreement on electronic tolling, now being used by on the New York Throughway, the equipment that is being used is not standardized. It doesn’t work with equipment developed for commercial vehicle operations. It doesn’t work with equipment for border crossing operations. It doesn’t work with fleet management systems and/or military operations. Once its provides nonstop travel for trucks routing through Canada may make good business sense. However, standard devices will be needed to support the business case. For example, consider an import container, bound for Detroit with a trucker who might choose to route through Ontario for time and toll cost considerations. You may not know the turnpike raised its toll rate so truckers are looking for other options to save dollars. So a truck that picks up freight at the port of Boston maybe cleared out of the terminal gate with an electronic imaging systems, be safely processed on the highway with the CVO transponder systems, pay a toll for electronic toll transponder systems and be cleared by customs at the Canadian border with a border crossing transponder system. Thus a motor carrier wanting to take advantage of the time savings afforded by these electronic devices currently may need several for trucks driving up the cost potential for electronic devices and also you run the chance the interference between the various systems. It’s not cost effective for them to do that because the systems are not interoperable.

I came to the position at Federal Highway Administration well aware for the requirement for freight tagging and trucking will vary with organizational responsibilities. Thus each of us seeks solutions that meet our individual organizational requirements. However, we often do not find it our responsibility to seek solutions that fully supports the end to end requirements of the supply distribution change and the improvement of government regulations. I certainly don’t claim to have the answers that will harmonize technologies and business processes in order to deliver seamless transportation systems. However, my military and industrial experience with transportation and technology as well as my current responsibilities in the Federal Highway Administration, provide me with a good vantage point. I understand the challenges that we face. The need for a clear road map. I will support harmonization efforts.

We have invited you here for these two days, not to mandate a solution, in fact, we are not so much after a solution, as a development of a process to seek a solution. It calls for the DOT position and transportation and trade issues and the responsibility that Congress has placed on us to develop certain transportation technologies standards. We have offered to be a facilitator as we search for that process together. Transportation is a common thread, let’s put it context. Transportation has always been a key component of freight mobility and associated cost. It is the economic engine that drives this economy. Some place between 11 and 13 percent of the GNP is impacted by transportation.

In the 50’s, General Eisenhower had a vision of a transportation system that move people, cargo and defense equipment across the country in record time. A network of interstate highways was born of that vision. It connects markets to customers and cities to rural areas and a defense support system from coast to coast and boarder to boarder. Today the challenge is global. We must go beyond the borders to win economically – to win from a military point of view. We must connect our many systems to the global network and our systems must be interoperable on a global basis. It must be easy to use and must be provided at a reasonable cost.

Last summer, for the first time in DOT history, leaders from every transportation sector met to talk about the future. We held two sessions, one with presidential appointees and career governing executives and the other with consumers and providers. Both groups agreed, we need an integrated transportation system that is international in reach, intermodal in form and intelligent in character and inclusive in service. We are working to make the four I’s part of the one DOT fabric. I’d like to view it as the I to the 4 power. The leverage you get from the four I’s together is greater than when added together. I would urge you to consider the four I’s in your discussions here during the next two days. Again they are international in reach, intermodal in form, intelligent in character, and inclusive in service. International – we must do transportation systems from a global perspective. What we do effects our trading partners in Canada, Mexico and the rest of the world. And our liaisons and linkages to Treasury and Customs information systems, require us to think and act intra-governmental and globally as we make systems and infrastructure choices.

Intermodal – we are here today to discuss the impacts of information technologies on the transportation modes and intermodal transfers at the nodes. We also need to integrate our infrastructure planning around the ocean carriers needs as well as the motor carrier, rail carrier, air carrier and the waterway carrier. Highways and the connectors are the key. Both highways link all the modes together. Intelligent – the key to operating an intelligent transportation system manner is to make effective use of telecommunication pipes to move data formatted to industry standards to those who need it. The other key to intelligent transportation systems is to get diverse organizations to work together. The method of integration required for instituting ITS program has proven to help in solving institutional issues. We need to work toward building an open systems architecture for intelligent transportation systems.

Last, just as we organize ourselves to perform tasks requiring input for multiple individuals we need to think more outside the box and consider the impacts of our decisions on other members of the end to end transportation system and involve them as well. This style of thinking can help us achieve interoperability. Shippers, modal operators, labor, community groups, political bodies, we need to bring in the political individual in the communities, because they are the ones that approve the construction of the highways or the institution of intelligent transportation systems. We certainly need to get the local communities involved. DOT over the last 18 – 24 months has held public outreach meetings which have been focused on freight movement issues. These meetings all dealt with port connector issues, mega-container ships, the Coast Guard and the Maritime Administration. Meetings are currently being held throughout the country for port improvement actions. The response from these meetings have been encouraging. Most of the participants welcome the opportunity to work together the improve our transportation systems in preparing for major impacts of freight increase over the next thirty to fifty years. The information and communication revolution offers the opportunity to bridge many of the components of freight tagging and tracking technology so that it operates transparently from the customers point of view.

Look at what we’ve been able to do with credit cards. All of the bank cards where brought together to serve the customer transparently. Yet each still has its own individual identity. How about electronic banking, that operates the same around the world and funds are transferred electronically overnight in a very short period of time. They have solved the issues of standardization, interoperability, harmonization. We need to do the same from the standpoint of electronic tagging, tracking and intelligent transportation systems. Just as Eisenhower saw a potential to connect many sectors of the country, so are many in DOT seeing the potential for a new system. One that connects the many systems that we are developing to streamline the transportation of freight. ITS and all that it entails is the interstate system of the twenty first century. If we work together, if we work toward harmonization of the multifaceted system components of freight and tracking and tagging, then we will have the interstate system of the twenty-first century.

So what are the challenges and risks. Everyone of us has pursued applications of this new world of information and communications. And it has made our individual operations better. But in so doing we have electronically hardened the fragmentation – making it tougher to achieve harmonization. We haven’t reached the real prize of information and communication has to offer – the bridging between the diverse operations. The integration if you will, thereby creating continuous operations across the entire spectrum of transportation. We must develop a good plan or we will continue to have difficulty moving information across mobile and turf boundaries. The following disconnects may exists: electronic customs clearance systems which are incompatible with fleet and container tracking systems and electronic tolling systems; fleet management systems that can’t take advantage of toll applications and customs clearance systems; poor gate access systems that can’t take advantage of the CVO tagging systems (CVO is Commercial Vehicle Operations); port arrival and freight destinations information that can’t serve everyone’s needs; electronic reader systems infrastructure for tracking – such as metropolitan probes, electronic tolling; and CVO clearances that can’t serve container reservation systems needs.

So how do we get to where we need to be. DOD convened the shareholders that are here today to see if there is a desire to begin a journey toward harmonization. Do we want to work toward harmonization? If yes, what is the process and the agenda that we can adopt for a cooperative journey toward a solution? Is there some low hanging fruit where we can work together to demonstrate early success? What are the longer term steps that will lead us toward harmonization? An idea. Start with an operational concept, sub-grouped from all the interest groups work to determine the operational concept for their particular mode – their particular application. How do they conceptually, theoretically think it should work? And then they come together under the larger umbrella group to bring that together in the form of an architecture. Lay out the process and the complexity. From that you get the requirement for standards and the need for interoperability. Once you get the architecture, what are the requirements that you need to implement, execute that architecture? The needs, if you will. And then you look around and see what is the existing technology that is out there. What are the capabilities that exist today that we can insert into this architecture to satisfy the needs and gain the interoperability that we are trying to achieve so that we can accomplish the operational concept? And where there are holes we need to fill in the gaps? We need to go to industry. We need to partner with industry to do the research and development, or find the applications or the technology to fill in the gaps. But unless we look at it in a holistic way, from the end-to-end user standpoint, we will continue to each look at our own modal segment or our own business applications and we will not get the interoperability that we need. There is nothing more frustrating than to go into the Northeast today and go across each of these toll agencies and know that you have to have a different tag for each one, or a different system because they do not have a joint billing system as the credit cards do. How do we bring all that together in the transportation business? We must, I think, start with an operational concept, design the architecture, identify the standards and the interoperability points, or the interface points, identify then the requirements, the needs, and find the technology to fill that in. So it’s going to take partnership. It’s going to take compromise. It’s going to take cooperation. And more than anything else, it’s going to take a desire and a commitment to get it done. Government and industry and the end users must all work together. Technology development, integration, standards, and the commercialization of the technologies. The key to our success will be to establish a relationship of trust and confidence in each other that will permit government and industry to work together in this partnership environment. Think big. Think globally. Develop definitive plans. We need a long-range vision for fifty years or more. We also need small, practical projects and cooperative ventures that will yield early, tangible successes and build the momentum for more progress. Consider the framework that I outlined, and then identify specific projects and activities that can make difference. Draft a family of documents to include an action plan, that includes your best practices, and then go forward. We all need a roadmap. The Federal Highway Administration is prepared to support a well-conceived, fully supported vision for the future. You will all be focusing for two days on technologies that can continue to make huge differences in efficiency, in effectiveness, and safety for commerce, for government, for national security. I am suggesting that you broaden you vision to include an overall framework and then work toward focussing on specific solutions. You have the opportunity to make a difference. Seize that opportunity today and tomorrow. Please keep in mind that today’s world cries out for bold, innovative, collaborative, less traditional responses to the problems that we face. Be bold. Be inventive. Take the initiative. Take some prudent risk. The challenge is ours to meet. I’m certainly honored to be with you today. I wish each and every one of us all the success. Keep up the great work, I know there’s a lot of great minds in this room that have been working this issue for many, many years. But as Secretary Slater is fond of saying, "the best, yes the best, is yet to come." Thank you very much.

Walton: Yes, thank you very much. I think you have established a vision in each of our minds of the program before us and we sincerely appreciate those articulate remarks about the opportunity we have at this workshop. Indeed, we appreciate you being here. I understand you might be able to stay through some of the presentations this morning. So what we’ll do is continue with the program and, as time permits, prior to the break we’ll have some discussion. Let me quickly just mention the others on the program. As you know from the program, there are two resource presentations which are over-arching to the charge before us. Both of those you’ll hear in a moment. But on your far right is Mike Wolfe. I think most of you have received background paper that he has prepared. And Admiral Seiberlich – Carl will also present his paper and I think all of you have that in your material as well. But before we get started, I should go back through and touch on some of the workshop objectives and the process. But before I do, I have two very important announcements. First of all, let me say that much of the success of this initiative was brought about by the leadership of the USDOT in pulling together the resources to enable the planning efforts and identifying those of you who should be represented and should be participating. I should recognize that John Horsley is here. John is the Associate Deputy Secretary of the Department of Transportation. He is also the Director of the Office of Intermodalism. John we’re very pleased to have you here. You will be hearing from John this evening, we hope. There is an event taking place that I mentioned before, the signing of TEA-21, so we hope that you’ll be with us this evening to share his remarks with us. But I would like to point out that it is under John’s leadership that much of this activity took place and we sincerely appreciate your leadership in that effort. A word from our sponsor… As you know, ITS America is a federally utilized advisory committee and in your packet material you will have an antitrust statement and during your time, if you will, peruse it. It is required that each and every meeting in which ITS America is participating as a facilitator, moderator that such acknowledgment take place.

Next, I’d like to get into the workshop objectives. As you can see and as you received the information prior to coming here, the objective is to bring you together. A highly selected group, if you will, representing all sectors of the public and private arena to help set, collaboratively, an action agenda to address the interoperability issues in intermodal freight location and identification. That is our principle objective. It was clearly stated by the Administrator and you’ll hear it time and time again. So it’s the over-arching systems view, if you will. There are a set of specific goals. One, to articulate the potential benefits of greater harmonization. Secondly, to identify candidate projects that will help achieve the desired benefits. Thirdly, draft an action agenda to achieve these benefits. And, lastly, to identify organizations willing to lead and actively participate in the agenda initiatives. Truly a very challenging set of goals and objectives for us, particularly in the timeframe that we have available to us. We’ve orchestrated a somewhat highly structured format, that you’ll hear more about later – that indeed allows us, we hope, to facilitate those ends.

Some of the contributing organizations that I should mention. We’ve already talked about ITS America as the coordinator for this event and pulling it together. I should acknowledge also that the California State University of Long Beach and it’s CCDOT which is the Center for Commercial Development of Transportation Technology is very much a sponsor of this organization as well. Dean Williams, I believe is here. We appreciate your support of this initiative. Others on there including the US Department of Transportation have been very much involved either as sponsors, contributors, or facilitators through this entire effort. So if some of you may [pause], if you have any doubts about why you are here, find the organization that you most closely associate with and there is the source. Next slide.

However, let me also acknowledge some of the principal workshop organizers. I can’t tell you, having been associated with this group, the time and effort that they spent on this activity. It’s been going on for some time, as you will hear. It’s an extraordinary effort and I think that [pause], personally would like acknowledge Mike Onder, and Gordon Fink, and of course Admiral Seiberlich for the effort that they took place, that they facilitated in making this a reality. It’s an incredible event. However, as many of you know, a special thanks, "atta boy," if you will, or "well done" as it’s said in the Navy goes to Carl Seiberlich whose vision and truly his persistence in making this happen deserves a very special recognition and again, Carl – well done.

Walton: And if we fail in this effort I can’t tell you how we’re going to reap his wrath. So please let’s all succeed in this effort. All right, let’s go to the next topic.

You heard a great deal about the survey. All of you received copies. Like most surveys, we received a reasonably good response. We’re satisfied that the indications that we received are indicative of the directions that we needed to go. It was a way in which we could calibrate the activities that take place in the workshop. It was a way in which we could see if we were on target, which issues needed to be addressed, and how to fine-tune the activity. It went into Mike Wolfe’s efforts as he drafted much of the work that he prepared. I believe he referred to the survey time and time again as well. You have a copy of the survey results in your packet. But let me quickly touch on a few. I think we’re mostly interested in some of the over-arching observations. To give you some idea, there were thirty-three responses out of some hundred and forty, I believe that we mailed out. And there will probably be close to a hundred and sixty people here also. This gives you some idea of the breakdown in the responses. I don’t know who the token academic was, but three percent represents this one person.

Some critical functional requirements, you can see clearly, were four top priorities. But one stood out among the others – equipment monitoring. And another was within regulatory compliance and goods monitoring, and so fourth. Some priorities for system characteristics – reliability pops up as being extremely important as does functionality. So reliability, functionality, and again individuals could respond to more than one need – so don’t go trying to add up the numbers. Then you can look across and get a sense of what some of the second level priorities were and maybe some that were deemed to be somewhat least important across the board. But look at the top ones and that certainly speaks to the obvious in many cases.

The right benefits to your organization, it’s felt to be substantial and significant. So clearly, from those who responded to the survey, there is a mandate for recognizing the benefits, real or perceived, associated with harmonization. So, in essence, that underscores the importance of this initiative.

This gives you an idea of the responses received from the organizations that individuals are participating. Truly a patchwork of standard groups and organizations out there. Another reason for trying to bring us together. Clearly, some work on various aspects of the issue that we’re dealing with. But there is a great deal of activity going on in a variety of arenas as you can well imagine and appreciate.

There were thirty-seven projects or activities that were identified that were focused on enhancing harmonization efforts and activities. Many of these cut across technology assessments, some standards, across border initiatives – rail, highway, defense, urban congestion, and the like. So there is a great deal of activity under way. So thirty-three people identified some thirty-seven areas.

The workshop preferences: when we asked that question we received truly a number of responses. Very interesting the way in which many responses were presented. They were clustered into these key areas – interoperability and harmonization of diverse operating systems – again speaking to the priorities and benefits, integrating user needs into more compatible data, better cost and benefit information on transportation technologies, and improving technology deployment. All of these very clearly highlight the primary objectives identified as well as some opportunities.

What to avoid. At this particular session will be no sales pitches, or random unfocused discussions, particularly around the coffee pot. Highly technical discussions are encouraged, and efforts to focus on why not to cooperate. In other words, we want the spirit of how do we make this happen. What are the issues to advance the overall objective? How do we capture the vision that the Administrator so clearly put before us?

And that’s it. So, let me add a couple other comments. You have information in your packet. We’ll come back later and talk about the breakout groups. Let me mention for you, there is also a copy of ITS Intermodal News. Some of you may be wondering if this is going to be another workshop were we come up some recommendations and then we go away and we never quite see how this is come to fruition. One of the ways you’ll be kept abreast will be through this ITS America newsletter. And I’m told that Gordon Fink from ITS America is to place everyone who is registered on the distribution list for this newsletter. You will be hearing more later about websites, and follow-up evaluation of the conference. Related information will be given to you so that you’ll be able to follow the events as they unfold through several websites which we’ve cross-linked. You’ll be encouraged to communicate with the website as well so we can continue a dialogue as this goes forward. But at least that sets out the workshop’s objectives. Sets out, I think, the goals that we need to accomplish, some information that we received back from you as to what the priorities and activities should be and why this particular initiative is important for us to pursue at this particular time. If we have time before the break if you have questions about any of the objectives, the goals, or any think of that nature we can deal with those at that time if you will. What I’d like to do now is to move into the next part of our program – the two over-arching resource papers.

Walton: I could spend a great deal of time talking about Carl Seiberlich’s distinguished career and the activities in which he has been engaged. But I would like to touch on a few things so that those of you who perhaps have not had the opportunity to work with Carl or be associated with him. So a little bit about his background. He is from Pennsylvania and he is a graduate of the US Merchant Marine Academy at King’s Point. His initial service in the Navy began during World War II. I might add that he is a designated naval aviator in lighter-than-air, heavier-than-air, helicopters with a day and night carrier qualified in all three classes of aircraft, and he also qualified as a seaplane command pilot. Don’t mess around with this guy, I’m telling you. As another sort of aside, he has a very distinguished military career, but I wanted to mention another side. While in command of the USS Hornet, he served as Commander of the primary landing area recover group directing the recovery of the astronauts in command modules after the first two lunar landing mission – Apollo 11 and 12. After retirement from the Navy, he served in various industry capacities and then as President of the U.S. Maritime Resource Center at King’s Point. In `83, as many of you know, he had a long and distinguished career with the American President’s Line as the Director of Military Programs. He retired in `96 and has joined VZM TranSystems Corporation as a consultant in transportation military affairs. It is indeed been my privileged over the last decade now working with Carl on many of the issues associated with this topic and it is truly a passion with him and because of his involvement, because of his leadership I think we’re here today. Please join me in welcoming Carl Seiberlich.

Seiberlich: Thank you very much Doctor Walton, I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to talk to this group. What I would like to do is take a look at the intermodal system from thirty-thousand feet at six hundred knots. You have in your packet many of the slides that you can refer to.

This was the most modern ship at the end of World War II – the C3 seventeen knot ship. Over a hundred years very little changed. The ships got larger and speeded up from eight knots to seventeen knots. They still handle cargo on the same way looking at a nine to ten day turn around. In April 1956, Malcolm McKlean began the first container operation. It really took until 1977 for the rest of the industry, other than sea-land, to really embrace containerization.

This ship was the first ship outside the sea-land family built from the keel up – twenty-five knot, twenty-five hundred TEU ship. It took four years to build this ship powered by a slow speed diesel. That’s drawn to scale. That C-9 against the Liberty Ship. I did a little study – movement of cargo from Oakland to the Arab Emirates. That C-9 in one year could move the same tonnage as twenty Liberty Ships. You’re looking at nine hundred members of the crews of the twenty Liberty Ships against twenty-one on that C-9 just to give you a gauge of what the productivity increase is from World War II. But the real move in both containerization and intermodalism has been the customer. His requirements and his needs. And the single most important thing I think to look at, particularly in the application of technology, is does it give value added to the bottom line of the customer and is it meeting his needs. If it doesn’t, it’s the wrong technology.

What do we mean by intermodalism? Lots of definitions. The most important thing here is that it’s a system rather than a modal approach. And you’ve got to view the process rather than the event. And to me, getting the modal operators to think system, is the most important thing that we really need to do to make it work properly. And here the maximum benefit in terms of cost and transit time. The customer’s interested in cost, transit time, on-time delivery, don’t lose it, don’t break it. And the provider has to make a profit. The balance between cost and transit time for any customer, I view as affordable transit time. Everybody wants it as quickly as possible but how quickly can he afford? And information is just as important as cargo. When you’re operating a business venture without a warehouse, you are in the position where information is absolutely vital. The evolutionary phases… growth brought on carrier regulation, then we had de-regulation in 1981, the Stagger’s Act really is what brought the ocean companies into the intermodal world. And of course, we have integration and optimization. I think, to the right you can see what has occurred in partnering and diversification, and of course increased competition. And it certainly has improved the efficiency of the whole system. But one thing you have to be very aware of – the more efficient the system becomes, the more fragile it becomes. And I think we’ve seen instances of that. For example, in Long Beach and in Laredo, and several other places this past year.

And here’s the infrastructure – I know you’re all familiar with it. But the asset base is there. And the service network, and I might mention that the bottom one of the areas is being looked very closely right now is the integration of the parts into the intermodal system.

And of course the information and communication networks, again, are absolutely vital to the proper operation of the system. And here again, people feel that they need to know more and more. And you have to be careful that you’re not asking the system to provide too much information because if you have an emergency or something goes wrong, then the system becomes flooded and there are many instances of the bad effects of that.

And of course the terminal network, and again in the last few years automation in the terminals has been moving ahead quite rapidly. And here again customer-driven. Consolidation, warehousing management, the value-added services will all come in to being because the customer feels that experts can do it better than he can.

This slide is an interesting one. We used it to discuss meals-ready-to-eat movement to the Gulf War. At the bottom was the way that it goes through a non-intermodal system and you’re looking at six interfaces. At the top, is an intermodal system where you’re looking at one system and controlled by one vendor. And in the intermodal system, positive control of the physical assets, the equipment, and the information for the customer for the time it is booked until it’s delivered. What’s come forward in the past several years is the alliances which have brought a number of companies, both foreign and domestic, together. And one of the challenges here is that as far as the tracking of cargo and the information systems each company have used when these alliances have come together, there have been major problems connecting and trying to make these systems compatible.

World container ports. Every red dot is a port that can handle a non-self-sustaining container ship. The port. This is a very complex operation I think, as you can see, and certainly the most important interface. The last few years they’ve had another port called the inland port which has caused some confusion, I think, because many people think it’s on an inland waterway. We’ve been looking at what we might call an inland port rather than a dry port and one of them that comes to mind that we’re kicking around is intermodal interface center, which might be a way to describe what the inland port really does.

In the terminal, the most important thing is to turn the expensive asset, the ship, around in the minimal amount of time and, here again, you have to have total control of every container there because the container has to be loaded in the right spot on the ship for stability reasons and for off-load reasons. And the container freight station again, customer service where the cargo and the information for the benefit of the customer must be controlled. This is a very vital part of the operation.

This is one of my favorite slides. On the left you have a freight bulk ship being unloaded with forty-five metric tons an hour with a hundred forty-seven steamadors. And on the right’s the President Kennedy being off-loaded by eleven steamadors with eight hundred twenty metric tons per hour.

Terminal productivity. On-dock rail is one of the newest things, but again if it is not properly controlled it can cause large problems. Dredging. Large problems at many ports.

Congestion. Again, the cooperation between the terminals and the MPO’s is very important here. And the land access, I think you can see, congestion, grade crossings, and adequate bridge and tunnel clearances are a problem across the board.

Double stack trains. When you look at this double stack train, basically what happened it fifty-two percent of the weight that was in a standard train car, flat car, to move two containers was taken out and converted to revenue cargo weight. That’s the secret when you look at that double stack train.

And this is the terminal at South Carney. When APL moved over from the Conrail Terminal they took forty hours out of transit time between train off-load time and the custom’s processing time.

And the truck – where the rubber meets the road and the final delivery stages. And again, very important to control this part of the operation. And the satellite communication network – absolutely essential and it of course has to be tied to the information systems. And those information systems basically have to work with the legacy systems that are there. And again we’re looking at EDI and the various standards there. And positive control of the assets in the terminal by the use of automatic equipment identification. This is just one example of these tags within the terminal to ensue that the right box goes out the gate or goes on the ship.

This is how it looks at what happened during the Gulf War. APL was hauling about four- to seven-percent of its capacity in peace time. With Dessert Storm, the requirement was for thirty percent of their capacity. This gives you an idea of the impact. And under the new program at TRANSCOM, the VISA program, the voluntary intermodal service agreement, rather than taking the ship as has been done previously under the sea-lift-readiness agreement, the portion of the pipeline that the companies operate is taken for military purposes.

This shows what’s happening in terms of a convergence of break-bulk cargo into containerized cargo. And again, as this change is occurring it’s putting greater and greater strain on the system. Increases in tonnage, you can see that it’s averaged around six percent and again the ports are going to be reducing dwell time and putting more cargo on the railroad and on the trains. The yellow at the top is the percentage of the large ships, the post-panamax ships, the so-called "mega-ships." And again, you can see as you move out there are going to be more "mega-ships" operating and again its going to put demands on the system.

Here are the ITS technologies. Many of these will be talked about today, but there is a great deal going on in terms of the application of technology. And, finally, I think the partnering that has to occur – the private sector, DoD, and the public sector to get these problems solved. And when I look at this, this is why we are all here today. Thank you.

Walton: Thank you, Carl. Each of you, as you know, have a copy of his slides and material and I encourage you to take the opportunity later to review those if you have not had the opportunity thus far. Our next speaker is I. Michael Wolfe. Mike is a principal with the North River Consulting Group. Mike is responsible for the background paper that you saw. In addition to that, he was an active and integral part of the entire planning for this event. And a tireless worker, I might add. I think he went through a number of drafts of that report that he prepared the paper. I thought it was very well done, in the sense that it was a very difficult effort to try and bring that complex material to a point that would be understandable and readable by individuals from a variety of different perspectives. I hope that you will agree that doing a paper like that is far more challenging, far more challenging than one that’s more technically oriented. Mike is, as I’ve mentioned, a principal with the North River Consulting Group as many of you may be aware has an extensive background with the USDOT Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in Cambridge where he served in various roles from Operations Research Analysts to Chief Carrier of Technology Analysis Branch to the Chief of the Intermodal and Logistics Systems Division. And in that capacity he has a number of assignments that dealt with, for example, the leader in the US Army’s experimentation with and adoption of the radio frequency ID tagging and tracking of key freight shipments, leader of the Volpe center programs support of several DoD agencies for intermodal freight tagging and tracking pilot projects in particular focus on business process, integration of new technologies, performance measures, and assessment program shaped and directed after action reports and data assessments of the RF ID freight tagging projects connected with international shipments to and from central Europe, Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. And it keeps going on with a variety of experiences all to suggest that Mike was uniquely qualified to take on a very difficult and challenging assignment which I think he did a superb job. The topic of Mike’s presentation is "Trends in Intermodal Freight Identification Technology." Welcome, Mike Wolfe.

Wolfe: Good morning. Mike, thank you for that overly kind introduction. It’s been a lot of fun for me to work on the paper and the presentation this morning. And, I particularly want to thank Mike Onder and the Joint Program Office, Federal Highway Administration, and Rick Schuman at ITS America for the support and encouragement to do this. One of the things we were trying to get a handle on was how do you bring a very diverse group of people with very different backgrounds together. Both the challenge and opportunity is building bridges across very diverse islands and communities of activity. One great illustration of the differences is an ITS meeting that DOT and ITS America sponsored two years ago in Baltimore. One of the first speakers got up and talked very much about all the activities at APL. And about have the people in the audience said, oh, APL – American President Lines. And the other half said, oh, APL – Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins. So in trying to build some of the bridges, what we’ve done is focus more on the uses of technology and not to deal with the details of the engineering down in the bowels, but deal with how the tools are used in what kinds of context, and what trends are there because that’s the framework within which any effective harmonization is going to take place.

I want to pull out three particular areas that were covered in the report. We’ve got a clear long-term trend, and I do mean long-term, in terms of technologies that get used to identify freight. That’s the movement from very manual processes to semi-automated ones up through automated practices. There’s a clear break-point at which we go from semi-automated to automated – to where the event reports identification activities are triggered as byproducts of the process of moving the freight as opposed to manual intervention. We can look at this a little differently. This one tends to focus on how we track where a particular vehicle or conveyance is. You can also think about it in terms of movements of paper documentation through to punch-cards to hand-held scanners for barcodes and then to RFID, radio frequency identification, tags or image recognition software. The last two would be two more examples that are above that red line. They are fully automated and are triggered byproducts.

Next I want to talk about three different alternatives or strategies or architectures or models about how one does business using different kinds of technologies. There’s a table in the paper that lays out the comparison of these in terms of how you identify freight, how you identify conveyances, how the network processes are handled. Let’s talk first for just a moment about "mute freight" moving in "deaf networks." This is a historical model. You can see it dates back to the Phoenicians and to the invention of paper. We’re talking about manually applied marks which required manual intervention – somebody to go look at them, read them, write down the results. Next one.

In terms of the networks, we’re talking about the ability to physically, or the requirement to physically go out and record the information. Now this is largely but not totally history. I’d say we can date this from the invention of paper through the introduction of punch cards. So this is like up through about the seventies. But it’s not done yet. This is one particular instrument of technology. There are no transistors. There are no electronics. This is a piece of chalk. Today, in the port of Charleston, the way container movements are managed the voyage number that a container is to go on is marked on the end of the container along with a very sophisticated coding – either "E" for "empty," "L" for "light," or "H" for "heavy." Now that clearly is "mute freight" in "deaf networks." There irony is it’s a system that works fairly effectively in Charleston.

The next model is one that reflects very good practice today. We can talk about it or describe it as "talking tags" and "listening networks." One of the terms that’s fairly useful here is this license plate or license plate-like technologies. And what’s important here to point out is we’re not talking about license plates in the sense of a regulatory technique that’s applied at the insistence of a governmental organization. We’re talking about unique identifiers that are used to identify either items of freight or combinations of those items on pallets or particular containers.

In this model, when we look at the networks we’re talking about either the semi-automatic or the automatic collection of information. So that can be tag readers, it can be the image recognition equipment, or other techniques. The first sub-bullet talks about how you collect the information. The second says that there is a requirement to be able to pipe that information around to users, preferably in standard techniques – EDI or through internet or other data channels. And then most important is once you’ve got the information, you’re able to exploit it and act on it. The intelligence in this case resides pretty much at the nodes of the centers of the network.

This chart’s an illustration of the types of labels that are used in this second model. So we’ve got things ranging from simple barcodes to 2-D labels, through various kinds of radio frequency tags, laser or optical memory tags, GPS and other kinds of indicators. Another thing that this particular chart indicates is one of the challenges connected with freight identification. And that’s the complexity in nesting of items in the shipment process. It’s not at all uncommon to find the five layer nesting that’s illustrated here. Where a piece part in a small shipment for repair parts is combined with others in a larger pack, which is separately documented, that gets put together with others on a pallet, and the pallet needs to be identified and tracked. Multiple pallets go in containers. Containers go in various kinds of conveyances. And in the course of transportation, the relationship among those units change. A less-than truckload shipment arrives at a terminal in one particular truck, gets taken off, gets handled and put on another, and the correct relationships between and among those nested units needs to be maintained.

Today’s model reflects this and reflects the multi-level identifications and the pulling together or the relating of those identifications in central databases, or distributed databases but not particularly with the individual freight shipments.

Summarizing here, we’re talking about the reflection of what good practices today. I think it’s important to note that it varies very much by the particular niche or community – so that we can be talking very much about, for example, retail-oriented barcode and database system. Dumb RFID tags in the context of an RFID tag that is simply an identification number, that license plate-like example. As an example on the railroads, the AEI equipment and often we don’t think about them this way, the GPS related to satellite real-time location tracking systems primarily to be looked at as operating as license plate kinds of processes where the main thing you’re doing is tracking the location of a license plate as it moves in a real-time basis across country.

Now, let’s push the edge of the envelop a little and look ahead beyond today’s good practice and look at the notion of smart tags and smarter networks. We’re looking here at adding intelligence and information to the shipments. So that freight items and conveyances carry not just the license plate-like identifiers, but also portable information which can be shipment-specific contents information the way DoD is working with it now, it can be itinerary-specific information. We’re looking at pulling in more integrated, less expensive, real-time tracking capabilities and some processing power moving with the freight. For the network we’re looking at leveraging and increasing the intelligence in the network – richer, more distributed decision support capabilities, and also intelligent agents and sentinels out in the network collecting data and adjusting operations autonomously. Brian Sharky’s advanced logistics program at DARPA is one of the places that’s pushing the edges on some of those sentinel and agent technologies.

Okay, what are some of the key developments that are important to pay attention to see if and when we move beyond the "talking freight" and "listening networks?" The underlying trend is one about the continuing improvement of technology – in regards to both interrogators and to readers. But we’re looking at making things smaller, getting more intelligence in those small packages, increasing the robustness and reducing the cost. All those things are continuing underlying trends that are going to show up, potentially, in two areas.

Let’s talk a bit about auto-networking tags, and about reductions in cost and improving the capabilities for real-time tracking. A couple of charts ago we talked about the nesting of freight shipments and the relationships within them. Auto-networking tags would be those that are capable of independently making relationships across those hierarchical levels. For example, from a pallet to a container.

Having this kind of capability would enable you to do several kinds of value added activities in dynamic situations. For example, managing complex multiple stop-off or drop-off scenarios. Or field-accessible storage – kind of deployed inventory. Two of the firms – PAR Technology is one firm that’s been working on these auto-networking technologies and I know Savi has done some work on it in the past. What we’re looking at is the ability to make relationships as it makes sense in a business model across these different layers, and conceivable getting us to the position where we have simpler tags reporting upwards.

Perhaps more likely is a trend towards cheaper and smart real-time tracking. What we’re looking at is the marriage of multiple technologies in integrated packages. We’re talking about pulling together location determination – GPS global positioning system is the most common of those. Other techniques or kinds of a location determination or others in some particular use such as dead-reckoning in certain limited areas. Different kinds of telecommunications capabilities and distributed intelligence. We’re looking at prices that run today on the order of eight to ten thousand dollars if you want a suitcase put together that gives you the capability to go along anywhere in the world and pulls these kinds of things together to the Qualcomm kind of capability that’s in very broad use. I think about two hundred and forty thousand of these are in place now in North America on trucks where you’re paying thirty-five to forty-five hundred dollars for integrated capabilities to track and manage trucks to capabilities that are available now where you can get a GPS card to go in your personal computer or laptop. Assuming you’ve already paid for the laptop, the GPS card is well under five hundred bucks to give you the capability to track where you are and do some reporting about it.

When I started doodling around with this paper, I thought, gee, neat idea is what’s really going to be pushing the edge of the envelope is around untethered trailer tracking, tracking containers that are not attached to tractors. And what I found was that in the course of doing the work, there has been a lot of activity going on, at least five or six vendors had services that are either right on the cusp of the market – sort in the last minute of beta testing or very much in the oven – and were looking at unit that are advertised now on the order of seven or eight hundred dollars up to about a thousand and twenty or thirty dollars a month in terms of operating costs. It’s not too far to get to the point where the costs drop to those that are suggested on this chart and the penetration of those kinds of technologies will take off very substantially.

Okay, wrapping up. Three messages. One is, where going to talk a lot about requirements, I suggest to you functional requirements are not written in stone. They very much are a reflection of the interaction of what’s needed to do a business and what technology makes available at what kinds of costs. And as available technologies change and costs go down, the view and vision of functional folks about what’s required to do the business changes. So it’s conceivable that our models of good practice today are going to change and it’s also conceivable that those changes, will very much aid and support the process of harmonization. That smart freight and smarter networks inherently makes it easier to do some of the harmonization.

Last, the incredible array of diversity and how different players are using these technologies is not going to go away. Long-term, we are going to be looking to moving together, weaving things together, but we are not going to lose with diversity. That’s it. I look forward to questions and comments during the breaks and as we go on. Thank you.

Walton: Thank you, Mike. Several excellent presentations this morning, I think, give you a sense of the challenge before us and it puts things in perspective that allows us to come together in a common front. We have some time for some discussion. As you’ve probably heard, they’re setting up the coffee outside now, so there’s a few minutes. Let me mention that Administrator Wykle will not be able to be with us for the meeting, so if you have specific questions of him, this would be an excellent opportunity to do that. Both Mike and Carl will be here with us through out the meeting but I encourage you to think of questions at this point that would be clarifying in nature and useful. Anyone that does have a question, I may ask that you use the microphone and that you state your name and affiliation. Questions. Who will be first? TEA-21 and intermodal funding is also on the table if anyone would like to ask any questions about that.

Walton: Mr. Wykle, given the nature of, particularly within TEA-21 and from the Federal Highway’s perspective, how did, in your view, did intermodalism, particularly in Federal Highway fair in TEA-21?

Wykle: I don’t know that we looked at intermodalism as a piece, in and of itself. But certainly if you go back to the original Bill – Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act – which was the first one, that put the emphasis on intermodalism and that really started the journey that we’ve been on for the last six years. So TEA-21 is a continuation of that, by a different name but certainly the same thrust is there - the Transportation Equity Act for the 21^st Century continues to emphasize intermodalism and the importance of intermodalism in terms of freight and passenger movements within United States. So as you look at the Bill and you look at various aspects of it, you’ll see there is money in there for research and development, and there’s money in there for Intelligent Transportation Systems. There’s certainly money in there for highway construction, bridges connecting the various modes of transportation together. There’s money in there for transit-type systems for access to airports and so fourth. So I would say it’s a very strong intermodal Bill with enough flexibility in there that you can do a lot of intermodal-type work or activities. I don’t know, John do you want to add anything to that?

Walton: We’re actually giving John an opportunity to put that in perspective for us this evening.

Walton: [Laughter] Other questions, comments? Going once. If not then, we do have a break scheduled. I would like very much for you to be back in here so we can begin promptly at 10:30. At about 10:25, the Steering Committee members will be moving about trying to herd you back. At 10:27 cattle prods come out. Join me in thanking Administrator Wykle.

Walton: This next session, as you see from your program, is the first of two that we have where we will focus on some major freight identification programs – both current status and future trends in facilitating the movement of freight. As you can see from the program, we’ve tried to select a number of key areas and individuals who can represent the state-of-the-art and the future activities in each of these areas again as a way of promoting the baseline information for all of us as we go into the workshop. It’s intended to cut across all the key areas and, of course, as many as we possibly can. So without further ado, our first presentation will begin with terminal operations in the port of Los Angeles, the marine terminal and inland operations. Our speaker is Robert A. Clark. Robert is Director of Terminal Operations for APL. That’s not the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins. It is the American Presidents Line, as you all know. He has a variety of background experiences – as Director of Terminal Planning, he’s been involved in terminal service, vessel direction, terminal Management. Prior to joining APL, where he’s been now for some eleven or so years, he was with United States Lines and there he was the Marine Operations Manager, Vessel Planner Outside Superintendent, and so fourth. You can see that he has a superb background to speak to us on this topic and I’ll now introduce Robert Clark. Robert, welcome.

Clark: Thank you and good morning. In case anyone was wondering, this is casual dress for California and we don’t wear boots in California, I would have flip flops today but that wasn’t the case… anyway. I’m going to talk about a couple of different things. First of all, I’m going to introduce a concept to you. We’re going to take a quick tour of Terminal 300. We’ll talk about it from a conceptual standpoint, developmental standpoint, construction standpoint – we’ll look at some of the highlights. We’ll move into a container movement through Global Gateway South, which is Terminal 300, all the way to South Carney. And then we’ll end by taking a quick look at the future.

If you don’t remember anything today, please remember this definition. At the end I’ll ask you to repeat it. Transparent end-to-end intermodalism is defined as the rapid and seamless interchange of containers between land, sea, and rail. Is it a stand-alone project? I don’t think so. I would like to imply that there are many different pieces to the puzzle. Including, the marine piece, the yard operations piece, the rail operations piece, and the logistical function. Together, the glue that holds them together is transparent end-to-end intermodalism.

Number one, in the one, for the one. The number one marine terminal in North America, the largest and most technological advanced, is the number one port – the port of Los Angeles, for the number one innovative company – APL.

Clark: I hope that doesn’t hurt the anti-trust agreement. All right, let’s talk about the conception for Terminal 300. That was my opinion, anyway. It was conceived in early 1990 by APL. We started negotiations with the port of Los Angeles in late 1991. Construction began in 1993 and was completed in May of 1997. We actual moved in June 20, 1997, so we’ve been in there a little less than a year. And actually going back, the port of Los Angeles conceived this going back to 1984 when they dredged the main harbor from thirty-six to fifty foot. They needed something to do with the dredge spoil, so there pretty good at long-range planning.

We’ll take a look at the development. We utilized total quality management principles teaming approach. We did benchmarking at the major terminals in Europe, North America, and Asia. I got to partake in a lot of those and I can tell you we had a lot of fun and did a lot of hard work, well worth the time and effort. We did computer models and simulations.

Taking a look at construction, some of the construction highlights – over seven hundred million dollars was the total cost. There’s five major grade separations. The grade separations are to separate train traffic from pedestrian traffic and commercial traffic. You can imagine a two hundred eighty to three hundred thirty TEU (twenty-foot equivalent length container) stack train trying to move through the port of Los Angeles, cutting across Terminal Island Freeway, Pacific Coast freeway, Anaheim Street, so they’re separated from a safety and productivity standpoint. There were significant road and infrastructure improvements – bridges, tunnels, and new highways.

This is what the terminal looks like – a sixteen acre work facility. One-hundred and sixty acre sea-wide facility. And a thirty-four acre on-dock rail interchange station. I’ll get into some of the specific highlights. A couple of other key points that you should know. There’s a federal break – water that basically goes the entire length of San Pedro Bay from Los Angeles to Long Beach. The pilot’s station, Los Angeles pilot’s station Angels gate is right here. So it takes a vessel approximately thirty minutes to come in through the gate, pick the pilot up and go port side too, forty-five minutes to go starboard side too.

Most of the terminals that I’ve worked at, we never had an opportunity for expansion, so this terminal was constructed with the idea that there’s growth for the future. There’s a seventeen acre nesting site right there that is actually under construction. My job originally was to introduce CATS into that area. I was successful. That will be complete December 1^st, so we’ll pick-up an additional seventeen acres, or about seven hundred wheel parking spots. Also, there is an opportunity if you would like, we could fill this in, add a fifth berth. There’s an opportunity to take the land back here. I should mention that the mode of operations we have here is a chassis environment. And this is a significant point – we put AEI tags on every single chassis. We don’t put AEI tags on every single container. We’ll talk about that later.

One of the other highlights that I should mention, although we’re wheeled operation on the benchmarking trips, in the major European terminals they are constructed with cement-treated base. So basically every tank north from here down to the rail is cement-treated base. An what that means is basically port of Los Angeles did the dredging in 1984, the land settled for almost thirteen years before we took delivery on it. It’s compacted. There’s a geotech mat that’s put on top of it. Three inches of crushed rock and fourteen inches of cement-treated base. And that means, if we chose, if we want to change the mode of operation and densify, we can run a grounded operation and not tear up all the asphalt.

Let’s get into some highlights. Marine department. Twelve state-of-the-art post-Panamax boss-gantry cranes. They can handle fifty long tons under the spreader. Take the spreader off, put a cargo hook on, we can do sixty long tons. There’s a rail spur that runs the entire length of the dock. And we can handle pretty much any piece that’s less than sixty tons. If it’s over that, we’ll bring in a floating crane. I told you it’s the largest and most sophisticated marine terminal in North America. It’s also the fifth largest container port in North America. We’re on track this year to do seven hundred fifty thousand lifts, so you can do the math and divide it by fifty-two.

Four berths – four thousand foot long. Those of you that took college physics will remember that a statute of miles is five thousand two hundred and eighty feet. So this is four thousand foot which enables us to handle four of the largest, most technologically advanced container ships.

Some yard highlights include eight rubber tire gantry cranes for grounding operations, hundred and fifty utility tractors – these are hustlers or UTR’s as we call them. We actually put a group together of the people that drive them and do the work for us – they developed a tractor for us. We’re using tires from mines in France that we imported, that actually we stole the technology and that we’re using. We also put air conditioners in them because novelty is an attribute of value. And on the West coast, we have a casual workforce so why go somewhere else when you have to drive a hustler that doesn’t have an air conditioner when you can come to our place and drive one in comfort.

Hundred and forty service vehicles – that’s pickup trucks, reefer monitoring systems, basically anything with wheels. Eight thousand wheeled container parking and four thousand grounded parking. If we chose, we can change the mode of operation and those numbers could be reversed or they could be equal, or it depends.

Some quick rail highlights. Ten ground-mounted gantry cranes. The mockup in the rail is the same as on the shore side gantry cranes. The thought being that people will come in, drive the rail. If they are good at driving the rail, then we’ll move them to the ship. There’s eight railroad tracks. During the construction we spent and additional two million dollars, so we have the opportunity to increase to twelve railroad tracks if we chose.

New technology – I think this is an important highlight that we’ve introduced at the terminal. Camera technology for inspections and security. Radio frequency computer technology. Automated electronic identification – AEI. We tag every single chassis. Global position satellite system, we have an MIV and I’ll talk about that a little later. And also in one of the breakout rooms you have a gentleman from Now Solutions that have three MIV’s that do perpetual inventories around the yard – that update and confirm container locations. Automated electronic safety devices.

Okay, we’ll change gears and we’ll actually move a container from the Global Gateway South Terminal 300 to South Carney, New Jersey. And we’ll look at it from a systems overview, inbound notification, ship operations, rail operations, from key to rail. Basically, the systems overview – there’s three components that we have: client system, an APL mainframe, and a terminal operating system. We do third party steam-a-doring for various lines. So their manifest and booking data and equipment comes in through our client system and is EDI-ed into the APL mainframe. And from the APL mainframe, it’s EDI-ed into the terminal system. The terminal system is NAVIS SPARCS and EXPRESS. SPARCS is used for the rail and ship component. And EXPRESS is used for the yard and gate.

In terms of in-bound notification via EDI, basically we know every single thing about that container. We know more information than we really want to. We know all holds and releases. We understand the routing information for all the imports, where they’re going, how they’re going to get there. We know which ones have the rail priority.

In terms of receiving. We get bills of lading for imports. We get complete inbound stow plans. Customs releases, usually prior to the discharge. Routing and rail priority. In terms of sending EDI’s. Activity messages for ship discharge. Rail mode-out messages. A train consists which is nothing more than a train stow plan.

We’ll talk about ship operations now. We utilize NAVIS SPARCS – we’ve been utilizing this tool for over a year – very, very, very happy with it. We do discharge planning. And we do crane planning. Basically, we work a ship in the system from start to finish before it gets there. We have what’s known as a pattern stow. Our containers are stowed in blocks, block one being the highest priority, block five being local. And we work the ship from start to finish and it tells us when the containers are coming off, at what time so they can be planned for the rail, and it also tells us how many chassis we’re going to use. So, we produce a document called a sequence. It goes out to the various departments – logistics does the train priorities, the rail does the planning, the planning group and the CY that actually make the chassis for us, they know when we need the chassis’s, the rail people know when the containers are coming off, our customers know when they’re going to get their box.

And also for loading, we try to do as much as possible, what we call cycle. Basically, a ship will come in, we’ll start it with either four or five cranes, take the deck loads off, put the hatch covers onto the back reach. There’s twelve containers on the off-shore, so the first twelve tractors underneath the hook, first twelve boarders will have chassis. We’ll take out those twelve containers. The thirteenth up will be a load. The crane driver will take the load, put it in a cell, move to the next cell, take the load off, put it on a chassis, next one come up to load and repeats the cycle. And we do about forty, fifty moves an hour when we’re in cycle.

We’ll talk a little bit about rail operations and SPARCS. Basically, as soon as the discharge planning is complete, the rail planning begins. And usually, as soon as the container is verified and confirmed in the yard, it’s loaded to the train. And that’s real important because we want to turn the chassis and the assets in the yard as soon as possible. The container gets loaded to the train and that makes the chassis back to the ship.

All right, we’ll take a look specifically from key to rail. Basically, the crane discharges a container to truck with a chassis, because that’s the mode of operation that we’re in. We have a ILW twenty-five percent marine corps with a hand-held mobile data terminal underneath the hook. He comes out of the hull. He’s not a steady employee. He records the container ID, the chassis, and the truck. SPARCS marries the container and the chassis, they tell the driver where to take the container to in the yard and park it, and gets his next set of instructions. Once a truck driver gets to where he’s going and parks it, he hits an F1 button which is confirmation button and it updates the system and he receives a new work instruction from SPARCS.

We’re in a strategic alliance with Now Solutions. We have three MIV’s, they do perpetual inventories. Again, we tag the chassis, we do not tag the container. During the perpetual inventory, the MIV, Mobil Inspection Vehicle, corrects the chassis yard position in SPARCS. Now the rail is looking for the container, the system tells him where to go. The tractor goes into the yard and picks it up. He delivers it to the rail-mounted gantry crane, where there’s another clerk with a mobile data terminal and who updates or records the carload in the slot, so it gets loaded to the train. And then SPARCS sends the next instructions for his next job.

Okay, rail loading – as completed a pull plan is prepared. Train consists to send only after it’s validated, and message goes to the rail line, and the UP railroad comes in and pulls the train out. That gets it to South Carney.

All right, that’s the definition I wanted everyone to remember – transparent end-to-end intermodalism. That’s where we’re going to in the future.

From a conceptual standpoint, all transactions are captured and recorded as a byproduct of normal operations. That means we know where all the containers are going, just by doing the work. Containers can be tracked along the current logistical pipeline. Container information is accessible to other locations – our external and internal customers, that is.

From a developmental standpoint, we’re in a strategic alliance with Now Solutions. We’re going to be pioneering this technology in Seattle. Just so you don’t think Seattle is some piddley littler terminal – a couple of quick characteristics: hundred seventy-five acres, twelve lanes on the out gate, stacked and wheeled so we can check containers and stack them. Five gantry cranes post-Panamax, plus on-dock rail. So that’s the next step where we’re going. If you do something like that, there has to be a payoff. Payoff for transparent end-to-end intermodalism for APL. So we can track and locate all containers in the terminal, one container space accuracy both wheeled and stacked environment. Can track and locate all the bare chassis. We can keep track, real-time when containers are decked and a truck driver comes in and wants the one on the bottom, they have to get shuffled. We know where it is, it updates the system. The people driving the container handling equipment are helped to do their job with this technology. We can track containers if we want to take the rail out of service and ground it on the rail, we’ll know where they are. If you want to take a container from the rail card and put it on the ground, we’ll also know where it is, and we’ll be able to make the information accessible to other individuals, external and internal customers.

And last, but not least, all transactions are captured and recorded as a byproduct of the normal operations. That completes the puzzle. Thank you very much, appreciate your time.

Walton: Robert, thank you. Next is rail operations. We have Richard Overholt, Director of Information Systems Technology, Norfolk Southern Railroad. Rich has quite a bit of experience in information technology. He serves as a consultant in his own firm for some three years and with another firm for over four years, all of which deal with the information systems and including, as I understand it, the development of intermodal management system for Norfolk Southern. Rick, we’re very pleased to have you with us.

Overholt: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Before getting started, I’d like to thank the parties sponsoring this workshop, especially ITS America and DOT, as well as all the presentations and all of you taking your time out participating in this. I have high hopes and look forward to our discourse during the breakout discussions this afternoon and our review tomorrow. This morning my task is to review the intermodal equipment identification process goals and issues as they impact the railroads. Like Mike said, my specific background is with Norfolk Southern where I’ve spent the last five years developing high-level planning and designing and implementing a terminal management system across our network. My goal is to provide each of you with the basic understanding of the steps involved in moving freight over the rail, concentrating on the equipment identification issues and approaches within each step. This goal’s to ensure you’re awareness of the railroad’s involvement in the process and thereby help guide our breakout discussions this afternoon.

To get started, I have put together a very high-level overview of rail operations, intermodal rail operations. But to serve, this is a large simplification but one that I hope will drive our discussion, keep us focussed on the critical equipment identification issues. The overhead show a process of a trailer container or chassis moving through the intermodal rail network. First, in the lower left corner the unit is brought into the gate at the rail facility. Once in the gate, it’s matched with its pertinent movement information and placed into the terminal’s inventory. At the proper time, the terminal then plans and loads the unit onto a car and then releases the track. Upon completion, the train departs with the unit. This unit can then be steel-wheeled delivered to another railroad where upon it’s received and moved forward to it’s destination. Upon reaching the destination, the train is placed at the terminal, the unit’s grounded from the train, the customer’s notified to come pick it up, and the unit arrives in the terminal’s inventory. Then the truck driver comes along and takes it out the gate. That’s a very high-level process that the remainder of the presentation is going to be walking through each of these different steps and going through some of the technologies that are in place, the current approaches, the primary issues, and the present requirements for a technology solution.

This overhead provides a detail of the in-gate process. Basically, the truck drives up to the intermodal terminal and undergoes a terminal entry process. The first step is to identify the unit and seal inspection. This step consists of gathering the unit number, which is a large number stenciled in different places along the unit, and is what the railroads use to identify the equipment throughout the terminal or on the rail. Next, the unit’s inspected for any damage and the seal on the unit is registered. As part of this, the equipment’s dimensions, as well as any special characteristics, are noted. And then movement information is verified so that the railroad knows what to do with the equipment. And in a nutshell, that’s the process of brining the equipment into the facility.

There are many different methods in place today to do this. The most sophisticated approaches which are now springing up appear to be video cameras at the gate, allowing a remote gate clerk inside and allowing the truck driver to remain with his vehicle. These approaches have a communication box for the truck driver in all the inspection and communications can be done in that environment.

The approach at Norfolk Southern has been to equip the gate clerks with hand-held computers and asking them to meet the truck driver outside, thereby still allowing the truck driver to remain with his vehicle. The basic approach, a more bare bones approach which is still used in may terminals, requires the truck driver to get out of his vehicle, walk inside and have the gate clerk use the inside, indoor PC’s. These different methods all exists, they’ve all tried to address the same basic issues though. Those are that the in gate throughput must be as quick as possible, yet the data accuracy cannot be the least bit compromised. Basically, you don’t want the truck drivers waiting in line to get into the facility, that you also can’t have the units enter without knowing about them.

Another issue that has made the accuracy difficult to edit is the lack of comprehensive intermodal equipment files. Thinking up a realistic approach to taking this to the next step would be for technology to allow the unit to somehow identify itself, similar with like having AEI tags on all of the containers moving through the facility. The main point there is that you reduce the user data entry errors. Actually, some of the remote video network solutions have tried to address this through character recognition, automatically reading the character from the unit, thereby eliminating the clerk’s entry of the number. Getting a little further out there, maybe a little too far for our discussions today but, the idea that automatic inspection or man-less gateway is very appealing but also very difficult to conceive. The video inspections make a step towards this but it’s hard to see anything like that happening in the near future. Next slide.

After the unit comes in the gate it’s placed into the terminal’s inventory. The inventory consists of several key components. Basically, answering questions like - what equipment do I have at this terminal? What is the unit’s specific terminal location or parking location? What is the associated chassis information? And, for that matter, what chassis or car or stack is the equipment in? So very specifically, where’s the equipment? Except perhaps for each unit’s movement information, the terminal’s inventory is probably the most critical component of the intermodal terminal process. With poor inventory information, units miss their trains because the terminal does not know about them or cannot find them. Even when the terminals know that they have the unit, knowing the precise location is critical to the terminal efficiencies, as shown when we get into the loading and grounding processes. Providing an accurate inventory is clearly important to the terminal success.

There are many different methods used today to keep accurate inventories. The primary method is to try to get the parking locations accurate when the freight enters the terminal, and then again when the freight moves. One approach to this is to provide the hustlers, the utility truck drivers of the terminal, with computers so that whenever they move a unit its location is updated. At Norfolk Southern that approach hasn’t been taken, primarily because the hustler meets [pause], we didn’t want the hustler to lose any efficiency moving the unit around safely throughout the terminal. But because of the results of that, we’ve had to dedicate extra manpower to drive around the terminal and capture terminal information, again using the hand-held computers. Another approach that’s still in place is the age-old method of locking the terminal and coming back inside and updating it in the computer.

Overholt: This scenario would be for each piece of equipment in the terminal’s inventory to be marked in such a way that it’s location was always known and that that location included the associations of what chassis it’s on, what car it’s on, what stack it’s in, etc.

The next step in moving customer’s freight is to load it out on to the rail car. There are a number of components to this step, but the primary ones are planning the outbound inventory onto the cars, notifying the hustler at the plant so that he can pull the unit track side, along side the right car, and then having the crane operator load the unit onto the car, and then finally verifying that all of this went as planned and that the track is ready for save train movement.

In many ways, this loading process is the heart of the terminal’s operation. Clearly, there are many steps to this process. With Norfolk Southern, one of the primary pieces of it’s new terminal management system has been a planning module to support this process. This is a highly graphical tool which allows the users to visualize the trailer’s containers in the inventory and the rail cars on the track, and drag and drop the trailer’s containers onto the rail cars.

Some railroads, again, have hustler-mounted computers to take this planning information, covey it to the hustlers and tell the hustlers which units to take to which cars. Additionally, some railroads have train-mounted computers where the crane operator’s able to register which units associated to which cars. In many locations, though, none of this is available or used and the entire loading process is handled through paper and voice communication. Again, this is the heart of the operation. There are complex planning rules. Basically, it requires detailed knowledge of the outbound freight inventory, as well as which units are able to fit in which cars and what blocking restrictions are in place for that train. The result has to be that the inventory locations are maintained accurately and that the car-equipment relationships are also properly maintained. That last point’s critical as all the train movements through the facility are tracked via the car, so the equipment is, the only way you know that the proper relationship is made up front.

Now that the freight’s loaded onto its rail car, the next step is to move that car to its destination – the train movement step. For the crews to run the train, they need to have an accurate train information, including details of all the hazardous documentation and all the units moving along the train. There’s a complex process of insuring that the train has the proper amount of power, locomotives, and crews but for our purposes these are available and the train moves to its destination. And again, depending on the origin and destination of the unit, the train may be delivered to another railroad through a steel-wheeled delivery process or possibly through out-gating the unit at a junction point and then in-gating it at the other railroad and passing it between the two via the street.

Tracking these car movements is handled today both via AEI and clerical entry. Practically all of the active railcars have AEI tags on them and, for those of you who haven’t seen this before, here’s an AEI tag. These are, like I said, bolted on to all the railcars and there are readers throughout the rail network to identify where that car is. Use of these tags has dramatically helped in generating accurate train reportings at Norfolk Southern and at other railroads, being much better than manual- or camera-based approaches. Our experience has been that there’s about a one to two percent error rate reading the cars AEI – cars being missed or cars being mistagged. And in certain circumstances, that error rate grows a fair amount. But because of the success of the AEI tags, NS has integrated the reader information into its new transportation system. Despite this success though, the yard reportings are still entered into the system and verified through a manual process so that the AEI tags are not truly relied on to generate the actual yard movement recordings.

Looking at the intermodal issues, there are some posed by wanting to even further automate the AEI use through diminishing its error rate. Another is posed by the clerical data entry. But the heart of the issue, or the most vulnerable area, is the possible mis-association of the trailers and containers to the car that they’re riding upon. The cars are tagged and can be seen moving across the rail, but the intermodal equipment is only, again, only available if it’s associated to the proper car. In the ideal world therefore, the association problem would need to be addressed so that the container and car could each be located in some fashion and their association would be evident not because some terminal clerk or crane operator associated them but because they’re moving together and the container was just a few feet above the car. Additionally, the location information would be able to be translated into the track standing order which is needed for transportation operations.

Okay, the next two slides focus on the place ground process and the out-gate process. These processes directly mirrored their outbound side of the plan release track and the in-gate process. And they both use the same basic technologies and have the same inherent issue. There are crane-mounted units to guarantee timing of the grounding of the unit, and the are hustler-mounted units to register specifically where the equipment moves through the inventory.

And again, just to review the gate functionality that’s in place. The video networks are being used at different terminals which allow the automatic character recognition and data entry and correlation, which has greatly helped the throughput at these terminals. Next, a summary of the issues.

Having gone through the process, and certainly there’s a lot of activity going on that we simplified here, but basically the issues that you’ve got are – you need to know the specific equipment location, and this is a critical component to the terminal efficiency; you need to know the equipment associations; you need to resolve the data entry accuracy issues; and because of the criticality of the terminal’s inventory, there’s a lot of manual labor involved in that step and a lot of, data entry accuracy issues; equipment master file information of all the different units moving across the rail to help edit these various steps, and then communicating this information to the various parties that need to receive it.

Thinking of the benefits of having this automated equipment location detection network in place – the proposed approach would be some type of method for the unit to identify itself like that used in the AEI technology – allow the unit to specify its number but also store some of its characteristic information in that device. And if possible, store the movement information or even the physical seal, the seal associated with it. That then complicates things because that changes move to move. And then continuously update the unit’s location – both geographically and with its associations.

The primary benefits of this approach would be the more reliable service, the more efficient service. Haven’t gotten it down to a hard dollar science, but clearly the customer would receive much better location access to there information which would help them do their planning and the movement through the rail facilities become much more efficient as the hustlers no longer have to hunt for units and the dray operators coming to pick up the units are also more efficient by knowing precisely where the equipment is. Well, that’s the presentation and looking forward to the breakout discussions and thank you all again.

Walton: I sincerely appreciate the challenge that the panelists have in trying to keep within the time constraints that we have imposed on them, and I sincerely appreciate their efforts to do that. It’s a very difficult assignment. The next topic is the commercial motor vehicle systems. Paul Pavlick is President of Bridge Terminal Transport Inc. where he has responsibility for managing an extensive network of intermodal trucking operations. He has many years, almost forty years, of experience in the maritime industry as well. He’s had various administrative and operating functions with extensive experience in container shipping. In addition, he has managed intermodal activities for a major ocean carrier. And as I’ve mentioned before, he’s now responsible for extensive network of intermodal trucking operations. Paul, we are pleased to have you with us.

Pavlick: Thank you, Mike. And thank you to the organizers of this workshop. I’m very pleased, I think, to have been invited here. Mike mentioned earlier that some of us might not have realized early this morning why we were here. Ever since my first invitation, I wasn’t sure why I was supposed to be here. Or even if it was a good idea. Driving up here last night from the Richmond area, I was almost convinced that I probably ought to keep going on I-95 and wind up in New Jersey for a meeting that I have on Thursday. But, I had committed to come and so I though that this would be, maybe from a very selfish perspective, a great learning experience for me and maybe I would wind up getting more out of it than I could contribute. I hope that’s not true, but if it winds up that way, well I guess I won.

This is my first association with a group like this and I thank you for the ability to do so. I was a little puzzled, however, at the first invitation because why do you invite the lowest member of the food chain in intermodal to talk to you? I was very puzzled by that. I’d like to give you a little bit of background about what we currently do, and it’s not a commercial and it’s not a sales pitch. It’s merely to put into perspective our interest in the subject.

Together with a sister company that we have on the U.S. west coast, we are essentially an organization that hauls marine and domestic containers within the owner operator community. We have thirty-five operating locations throughout the coastal areas of the United States and the interior. And in the interior we are also container depot operators. At present we have approximately fifteen hundred contractor drivers and trucks – eight hundred of them are local trucks doing local dry work and about seven hundred that run the interstate highway systems.

In order to put into perspective a little bit about volumes, during last year our drivers made eight hundred thousand revenue moves for us, logged eighty two million miles on the highway, and are in and out of marine, rail, and customer facilities approximately forty-five hundred times per day.

I found it a little bit difficult in determining what kind of presentation to make. I’m sorry, I apologize if I disappoint you that I do not have any automated systems, but please understand that from our business our view of long-range planning is – are tomorrow morning 0800 appointments going to get covered. Our industry, the container hauling or dray industry or however you wish to phrase it, is not particularly sophisticated when it comes to freight identification in any automated fashion. We have to be sophisticated internally in order to get our business done. You can imagine just merely the task of ensuring that you properly pay fifteen hundred drivers every week who are paid by the individual trip. Without automation, we couldn’t survive. So we have automated systems that are typical. They’re internally developed. They’re relatively selfish in their sharing of information, although we do have EDI in and out capabilities. Our automation tends to follow the work step process of the business that we’re in. We do not, for example, participate in any type of automatic tractor identification. We have not found the cost benefit of doing so, however we believe that that will happen in the future.

What we view as the current major issues, and they’re major for us but maybe even more significant for the facilities that we’re in and out of every day. Dirt is expensive. Whether that dirt happen to have been dredged out of the L.A. harbor, or dredged out of the port of New York harbor, or is adjacent to a rail track – dirt is expensive. Growth cannot continue by just adding dirt. I think each one of our operating friends realize that productivity is the issue. That we all, in working together, have to find ways to make each other more productive. Today, as a motor carrier involved in the transportation of containers, we have very little reason, we have very little desire today, to have automated identification on our tractors because, selfishly, we do not see the benefit to us. However, we see an incredible benefit if we wind up with tractors and their trailing units being able to pass through roadside inspections, toll booths, in-gate on a marine facility, and out-gate of a rail facility. We see terrific and tremendous benefit from a productivity point-of-view. Our job is to make our drivers the most productive we can make them. And if we can contribute to making gate complexes much more productive, we are certainly willing to do that.

The trends that we see, in our myopic view, are trends which are very traditional. We see that the computer applications being developed pretty much in a vacuum; pretty much for serving the particular purpose that the developer is interested in; very, very independent in their design; and probably not very good at working with other computer applications. While we can live, temporarily, in environments like that, we find that for the future that environment is not going to allow the growth that will be required to sustain the businesses that we’re in. We look forward to participating in this workshop and thank each of you and the organizers for the invitation.

Walton: Paul, thank you very much. Excellent remarks. Next we begin a series of three presentations, one now and two after lunch dealing with institutional programs within the Department of Defense – transportation requirements and programs. We are very fortunate to have James Emahiser who is the Acting Principal Deputy Secretary of Defense Logistics, Department of Defense. He is the principal advisor to the Deputy Under Secretary for Logistics for policy and oversight for the services and defense agencies logistics activities. He’s also responsible for specific functional areas of maintenance material management, transportation, and life cycle information integration. He has over thirty years of logistics and management experience in this position. Prior to assuming this job, he was Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for material and distribution and management, served as the focal point and contact within DoD for the development of concepts, objectives, policies, and programs for improving management material and distribution systems. We’re very pleased to have you with us today.

Emahiser: I certainly appreciate the invitation to be with you today. Before I get into presentation over the next couple of minutes, I’d really like to recognize a couple folks who’ve played key roles in what I’m really going to talk about – which is the development of a concept of operations using AIT. Ed Coyle, who is here, is actually the project manager, works out of Defense Logistics Agency and is responsible for the overall development and running of the CONOPS for the Department of Defense. Al Estevez, sitting over here on the left hand side, is really the OSD person that’s responsible for overseeing that whole program, and tries to go out and beg, borrow, and steal money to make sure the program gets funded. Jim Carnes, who’s sitting in the back, has played an important role in that program, and also plays an important role in the standards community. And then Brian Sharkey, sitting over here, who, from a DARPA point-of-view, is involved in the advanced logistics programs, where he’s trying to develop tools over the next several years for logisticians to use to include AIT kinds of technology that allows us to do advanced planning as scenarios change, has also played an important role.

I’m not going to read these charts to you, but you can certainly see why we feel that we need to utilize automatic identification technology to enhance our ability to track document control units in cargo by units. That could be personnel, as well as material, to streamline our logistics processes and to enhance our war fighting capability. Included is the idea that inventory should be in motion, inventory anyplace costly for us, and so it becomes a key part of our asset visibility program for us to manage the assets we have.

If I were giving this kind of a presentation about three years ago, one of the charts I felt I would have had to show is the stackage of containers sitting in the various ports during Desert Storm and Desert Shield. Where, depending on whose number you could belief, we had anywhere from twenty to forty thousand containers stacked up in various places of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait – pick a place in that part of the world – we had minimal idea of what was included inside. We brought most of those back, had to open them up in the U.S. to even see what was included in those. So this became very onerous for us because not only did we ship all that stuff, we went out and bought behind it to make sure we still had inventories. In January of 1997, we agreed with the Joint Staff that we needed to establish a task force to get a handle on a concept, to get a handle on our concept, and develop a concept of operations, on how we’re going to utilize AIT. And so, on April 21^st, the concept was approved by the AIT Principals – that was a brilliant excuse for me to have a birthday party since that’s my birthday. Then we had the overall CONOPS approved on November the 12^th at the departmental level. And it really established a framework for us to go out and look at how we should utilize AIT and the whole suite of those, and identified implementation actions we would need, and assign the overall responsibility for the department to Ed Coyle and his staff.

We’re trying to do this right, in that traditionally we’ve maybe tried to do doctoring ahead of time and doctoring is how we do things in combat. This way, we’re trying to get the CONOPS in place, therefore we can develop doctoring and be able to do things in the same way in piece time as we do in war. These are the implementing actions that govern the overall concept of operations that have led to the test and these are the criteria on looking at the kinds of decisions that need to be made, the kinds of standards, or truly adopting a commercial standards were possible. I was told I should hammer the idea that it’s called interoperability for us and with the industry. Certainly we need interoperability within the various Departments of Defense and as we move from one mode of transportation to the other we’d do a business case analysis to make sure that we chose the right way to do our business and the idea that we already have as policy the utilization of barcodes as our basic information technology, that was we’d move to things like 2-D barcodes, optic memory cards, radio frequency identification, and then utilizing satellite tracking to track vehicle in-theater, and try to pull that all together – decide how we need to do our business in the future.

We agreed that we needed to do a prototype. The J-4 at that time, Major General Mike McDuffy, who was in Europe volunteered to actually be responsible as the CINC’s representative to over watch the test and primarily let it be tested on assets as they went into and out of Europe. And then you can read the overall purpose – to validate the concept of operations, to try to agree on a suite of AIT technology to let us do our mission, and the be able to take and export that once we’ve tested that in Europe, that we’ve decided the best ways to take, whether it’s air, sea, or rail, and be able to track inventories that move in-theater. We can export that because the idea would be that our soldier, sailors, marines, and airmen should be able to see the same system operated in Europe as they see in Korea, as they see operated at Fort Hood, Texas. And then to agree to an overall DoD strategy.

We recognize that every time that we go into, whether it’s a major war like Desert Storm or Desert Shield, or whether it’s a mission like we’ve done in Somalia, or in Bosnia, or in Haiti, that we have to have the ability to go into country and treat it as a bare-base operation. And so doing, we’ve always had the idea that we need to have fly weights, because that is a kit that has the various technologies, whether it’s readers, or the ability to produce barcodes, to include satellite transmission vehicles and all those kinds of things built into a kit so that during the operation you could pick up your suitcase and go, and be able to be on the air and, in this case, tracking inventory, tracking containers, tracking trucks, tracking personnel, as soon as you are on the ground. And then look at our ability to surge and how to handle deployment, re-deployment. Folks read about deployment. I would just tell you that it’s harder to re-deploy. There’s a whole set of issues in re-deployment – soldiers and sailors, airmen are in a hurry to get back home. You have do things, agricultural inspection is required, cleanup of equipment, and so it’s just s whole different set of headaches on re-deployment and again, back to how we’re going to interface with the commercial sector.

These are the various scenarios that we’re using to prove our concept of operations. The first tracking unit moves, a re-deployment of the second ACR out of Bosnia. That became really the focal point as we try to track those soldiers and their equipment coming out of Bosnia. Then we thought that we needed to make sure we had the various CINC’s involved and be able to track air pallets, commercial sea van movements, and then in conjunction with the Army, the movement of ammunition because of its peculiar requirements around the world.

This is the operational prototype we used – 2-D barcode for transportation and supply. We had to look at the process servers to be able to interface with all information technologies. We also had to be careful not be become mired with the technology that was available, but rather decide what we really needed to do and how to do our business. And, I mentioned the fly away kits, the optical memory cards – we also already seen as a standard, the Army was a major user and now we see the Air Force and the Navy coming on line. TC AMES 2 is the next system that the transporters of the world will be able to use to track their inventory.

I would just leave you with the idea that the concept was approved, the prototype is in fact underway, hopefully we’ll come out of it with an implementation plan, developed and being finalized and staffed with the CINC’s. And we recognize that there’s going to be a mix – it’s just not going to be 2-D barcodes, it’s just not going to be optical memory cards, it’s just not going to be radio frequency technologies. But whatever the mix is that, I don’t want to pre-judge what that mix will have, on the concept of operations and soldiers and sailors that are looking at that. We’ll let them drive what that mixture is, but the key is to provide asset visibility to the war fighter and to the inventory manager. If I have inventory control, if I can see it – that’s less that I have to buy, that’s less that I have to stock, store, and issue. That means that I can share those assets amongst the services and so that becomes a very key [pause], key for us. And I recognize that I’m that last thing between you and lunch, so I’ll say thank you very much.

Walton: Thank you very much. We do have time for any questions or any comments that you would like to make. Again, I’d like if you would to identify yourself and your affiliation.

Walton: Very quiet group. I don’t want to here now that I didn’t have time to talk. Yes. There are mikes back here, if you don’t mind.

Member: Hello, I’m Jim Caponiti with the Maritime Administration. I’d like to ask Mr. Emahiser, did I get the name right, as DoD [pause], You’ve got a shared logistics situation and you’ve got your own logistical chains, you’ve got your own systems, but as we move into the future you’re utilizing the commercial systems more and more. And I was wondering how [pause], how you see the evolution into utilizing the commercial transportation terminals more and more? Are you going to continue to integrate with those existing systems or will there be a continued trend towards using your own systems?

Emahiser: I really think it’s going to [pause], we have a mixed bag. Number one is that about ninety-five percent of our freight right now moves in commercial, you know in commercial sector, not necessarily through ports, that kind of stuff. I don’t see us moving away from utilization of the some of the Air Force bases and those kinds of things, but we recognize that it’s key for us to be able to integrate with the commercial, the commercial sector, number one. Number two, as we look at downsizing our infrastructure and the logistics community is under pressure to downsize and re-look at it’s whole logistics infrastructure as a bill payer for the Department’s modernization Bill that its wants to pay for between now and O-3 [reference to 2003]. We have to recognize that we may have to make the [pause], what I would think would be the logical decision to put more and more through the commercial ports and that kind of thing. So I see that as possibly one of the outcomes that will come out of this will be for those kinds of things.

Member: My name is Tom Mottl, I’m an independent consultant. This is for Mr. Pavlick. Your industry represents a very significant aspect of this whole intermodal problem and, truly with all the operations you have, you and your people have a lot of insights into some of the issues and problems. I’m just wondering [pause], you indicated in your talk interest in an awareness of the necessity of making computer technology, EDI, and so forth, relevant to the operations… to get more productivity. Institutionally, that’s where the problem usually lies - not so much in the technology. And I’m just curious how your part of the industry reaches out and what the connectivity is to all the other pieces of the industry to try and address the interfaces and the productivity issues.

Pavlick: Essentially what we do is, today, relatively primitive. We try to take advantage of our own and any one else’s automation. For example, we have major customers who, when they have work to be done, they just push a button on their PC and that works through EDI comes to us, we have the ability to say yes / no, and get the job done. We also try to work with waterfront operations where there are synergies that we can get. Where we can get accesses to databases which contain – is the unit off the ship, is it customs-cleared, is it cleared by the shipping company, does USDA have a hold on it? We work very hard to do that but it’s kind of just an ad hoc thing that really is not industry-based because there’s very little commonality within the industry. We certainly look up [pause], we inquire into various people including the railroads databases to get information but that’s in lieu of making a phone call, to be perfectly frank. And it’s easier than making a phone call. It’s not very integrated at all. We’re hoping some day it will be but today I don’t believe it is. Have I addressed the issue, sir?

Walton: Thank you, Paul. Other questions? Comments? I’m hearing now we have several announcements. We’re, we’re [pause], yes, please, I’m sorry.

Member: I’m Jon Ranstrom from Navis Corporation. A question for Mr. Emahiser. Where I am in the industry, I care a lot about tracking containers and I really don’t care about what’s inside of containers, and that typically if we know where the container is we have a box number and there’s a database reference somewhere that seems to be pretty reliably kept within most of the industry as to what’s in it and it’s not a real big problem I’m just wondering to what extent is that true for the military, or do you, you know [pause], if we draw a line and say we’ll track the containers and not worry about what’s in them – is that useless to the military or also useful, what are you feelings about that?

Emahiser: Do you want my personal thoughts, you want [pause], and Alan Estevez will correct me – I care what’s in the containers. It’s nice to know where the container is in motion, but I need to know what’s in the container because chances are it’s going to be a break-bulk shipment. Part of it’s going to go to one [pause], once it hits on the ground in Bosnia I’m going to have to take and segregate that and it’s going to need to go [pause], part of it’s going to go one place, part of it’s going to go another place. So I care what’s in there in order to be able to make distribution in-theater. Also, I care what’s in there, again back to inventory and inventory control. I need to know where the ISO is or whatever it is, but I also want to know what’s inside that container.

Ranstrom: What I’m referring to [pause], we know what’s in the container but we don’t know it because there’s a bar tag or Savi tag or bar code on it or something like that. We only know what’s in it by a reference to a database that’s maintained elsewhere. That’s been an approach.

Emahiser: As long as there’s a way to get to what’s inside the container, the I’m happy. Because I’ll have people wanting to know where their hubcap is for their truck, or something like that and so they’re actually going to want to know. But that’s a facetious example but you know, we’ll actually get down to tracking where boots are, or where MRE’s or the food stuffs are, and we need to be able to tell it by [pause], as again I have interest what’s in there. As long as there’s a way to get to what’s inside the container through an AIS system, then that’s fine. But I need to be able to track that requisition status so that the individual knows when he can expect to receive that.

Ranstrom: So another way to ask the question than, is there such a database or given a container ID you know what’s in the container? The answer’s probably no if you’ve said that you had to ship back a bunch of containers.

Emahiser: Well, that’s four years [pause], that’s you know going back to Desert Storm time. Now the hope coming out of this is that we’ll have the ability to do that. I would be less that honest to say "yeah, we’ve got it now" – we don’t. It’s still kind of hit and miss. But the idea coming out of the CONOPS is that we would have the ability with technology today to be able to do that.

Walton: Yeah, we all remember how some of the turkey dinners were found. Any other questions? Yes. And then Ann you’re next.

Member: Lou Roach, Sandia National Labs. I have a question for Mr. Emahiser. On your AIT test and your CONOPS, I’m curious about looking beyond the individual content that are moving in a deployment. Are you looking at this from the standpoint of how you would view the overall deployment effort in the logistics and buildup in an aggregate sense, or are you looking more at the individual items coming through?

Emahiser: On a day-to-day basis, as we were sitting today, I worry about inventory in motion. If we thought we were going to plan to go into [pause], I’ll just say Bosnia because we’re there now – if it looks like there is going to be a chip, that I want to be able to use that for planning scenarios to be able to track, you know, if I’m going take and deploy the second ACR from the U.S., then I would worry about being able to track not only the tanks and Bradlies and soldiers, I want to be able to track those through the system. I’d want to know if there’s a bottleneck in the system somewhere. For instance, a railhead gets clogged and I can’t get through. I want the planning tool to be able to allow me to go to some place else and be able to know how long it’s going to take. So I’m looking for also those kinds of things. And that’s some of the things that Brian Sharkey’s doing now with his effort and we’ll see some of that again in this because I’ll be able to see where bottlenecks are and be able to plan, I’ll know when a ship’s going to go into Rotterdam. You know, they’ll know ahead of time what’s on that ship, in the containers, therefore they can plan for moving through the port and all those kinds of things.

Member: I’m Ann Aylward from the Volpe Center. I have a question for Mr. Pavlick. As you and others have observed, it’s your part of the industry that tends to touch all of the other segments of the industry and I’m wondering whether, as your drivers experience the gates at rail terminals and port terminals and your own depot terminals, are you encountering very different kinds of technologies in those terminals, or are they relatively the same with relatively the same kinds of issues.

Pavlick: Each one is unique. Even among common customers. Each rail terminal has uniquenesses about it, each water terminal has uniquenesses about it, and technologies have been developed and implemented basically relative to volume. Going into the Norfolk Southern Terminal in Knoxville, Tennessee is very different that going into the Norfolk Southern terminal in Atlanta, Georgia. The same is true for waterfront facilities and, quite honestly, the same is true for the depot we operate. If we’re operating a depot that has a hundred parking spaces, we may not make the investment in technology that we might make on a twenty-two acre, twelve hundred parking space facility that we have somewhere else. So I think it’s all been done on a need and cost benefit way. We go through various waterfront terminals, some operated by the same company where the same terminal operator will have a facility in Charleston, Norfolk, and the Port of New York and New Jersey. They are, trust me, they are very unique experiences.

Walton: Yes, thank you all for that response. Several announcements before we close the panel. First of all, I told you before that ITS America is the entity that’s coordinating this activity, so a lot of the work that’s going on with the staff and with the video being handles by the staff, and I’d like to recognize the President, who is now present with us, of ITS America – John Collins. John sitting back over there. John, welcome. [Applause]

Walton: John, they’ve been doing an excellent job. We appreciate the activities to coordinate this. You should all have received a pink slip. Now I know pink slip means something to some people, but you want a pink slip and if you want to eat lunch you should have had one passed out to you or pick one up from Gordon on your way out. Lunch is buffet, it’s upstairs [pause], what is it the fifty-seventh or something, its only [pause], we have a designated area, seating area for you, it’s buffet. I would ask that you return here by promptly by 1:15… the program will begin at 1:15, let me put it that way. And as we close, again please join me in recognizing the contributions of our panelists – both Robert, Rich. Paul, and Jim.

Walton: Alright. You will be pleased to know that United Airlines has graciously provided CPR training next door, so in the event that the urge strikes you, you’re in good hands. This session continues the one just prior to lunch. As you recall we were talking about major freight identification programs, current status, and future trends in facilitating the movement of freight. We have two presenters this particular segment, in continuing the discussion of institutional relationships and programs. The first representing the Department of Treasury, the Director of International Trade Data Systems… Robert Ehinger. In fact, many of you know Bob. He has been very much involved in customs service for some thirty years.

Walton: He’s held positions at the Port District Regional and Headquarters levels of Customs. But particularly I think which you may be interested in knowing, that since in `93 he was appointed Director of a Future Automated Commercial Environment Team, "FACET" I believe, a new program that U.S. Customs Service developed leading to the next generation of Customs automation. That is continued to promote additional efficiencies in cost savings in government for the exporting and importing public. But since 1995, Bob has been serving as the Director, as I mentioned, of International Trade Development Systems, ITDS. The project office which is a special office within the Department of Treasury reporting to Vice President Gore’s National Performance Review, the NPR. This office is responsible for standardizing a national trade data so that one submission to the government can satisfy Federal trade agency requirements for import and export. Another facet of this office is to extend the same standardized concepts to Canada and Mexico and develop the North American Trade Automation Prototype. Bob, we’re very pleased to have you with us.

Ehinger: He’s very right. I just [pause], my speedometer just rolled over within the last few days – I’m entering my thirty-sixth year of this torture of working for the Federal Government.

Ehinger: I want to talk about the future as much as we can this session. There is another session later this afternoon, my compatriot Bill Knoll will be talking specifically about the NATAP Program. But in fact what I thought we should cover here is ITDS and what is the vision, what is going forward, the requirements for border processing. It is clear that as we enter the 21^st century we better get some us out of the number of, significant number of billions of dollars we spent on electronic equipment and processing within the Federal Government. Essentially ITDS, International Trade Data System, is just what is says there – an integrated government-wide system for electronic collection use and dissemination for international trade data. For those of you who don’t know, this is the only government in the world that doesn’t have a centralized international trade authority within the government. Most governments have a departmental-level function called international trade, and within that you will find all the agencies that have to do or functionality that has to do for most governments with trade. In the United States, we have 104 federal agencies that have something to do with trade and they all poke, and pinch, and prod, and have requirements, and jump up and down about what’s right and isn’t right, and they all get in each other’s way, and have created probably one of the worst messes of any industrialized nation for international trade requirements that we could possibly have.

The notion of ITDS is to take that dog’s breakfast of requirements and processes and so forth, and see if we can’t make something sane out of it for the 21^st century. Again, we damn sure better because the cost that we are levying on American business by the current processes is unacceptable. It is estimated to be somewhere between 4 and 6% of the value of international trade is consumed in satisfying the government requirements. There’s not a cent worth of additional value added to the products and services traded internationally by the imposition of government requirements – that is pure overhead. And if you see the figures of what constitutes the value of international trade, trillions and trillions of dollars is very scary that 4 to 6% of that is consumed in the requirements that are levied by government. Ask any business man you meet next how he would like to add 4 to 6% to his profit base. You wouldn’t get a no, I’m sure from any of them. So that’s really the issue and we’re really trying to say that the government should be able to develop a standardized, centralized, collect-it-once, shared among the agencies, simplified, international trade system. That is it – basically the requirements, functional requirements that are coming down from this effort.

The system not only has the functions as pointed out in the first bullet statement but the notion that we will construct everything in this system, the data, according to what our normal government requirements where we state what you have to give us in terms of information – you have to give us special definitions of cargo and so forth. We’re trying to get rid of that and go to what is called the commercial-based data elements. In other words, the government ought to be able to use the information that is commonly traded among buyers and sellers as part of the commercial transaction instead of having it reformatted, restated in some special "govermentalese" that adds additional cost. It’s one thing to standardize the process but if we standardized it based on bureaucracy requirements, we probably wouldn’t have done too much. To the extent that we can go to the commercial level information and use it because it’s already available in the environment, in the electronic environment for most businesses, it becomes even more of an efficiency factor. An ITDS will implement fully electronic border processing operations. Many of you have been to seminars or events that I have the pleasure of speaking at and heard me say that if you don’t believe the necessity of this, take a trip from Laredo. It’s not a good idea, Laredo's not what I would call a vacation spot of the world. As a matter of fact we have someone in our office that defines it as two strip malls divided by I-35. That’s all that’s there. And so if you want to see it, if you want to see how this operates go and watch the twelve miles of standing traffic that’s in Mexico that’s waiting to come to the United States and many occasions, the eight miles of traffic that’s standing in the United States that’s waiting to go to Mexico. I was with a Danish Diplomat who came to look at some of our experimental programs there not too long ago and we were standing looking at him, of course I was babbling on and on about what a wonder thing this was – all this new electronic stuff that we brought to us and so forth – we demonstrated it and for the few transactions that he could see, it was an improvement over the other. I was talking about how significant free trade was between Mexico and the United States and what an improvement this was in our relationships and so forth, there was kind of a pause, I’d run out of what I had to say, and he paused, one of these Jack Benny pauses you know it lasts and lasts and lasts. And he says, gee this doesn’t look like free trade.

Ehinger: That was humorous, but it’s not humorous. When you are standing atop a tower like we were, looking down on trucks that were waiting, the doors were open and drivers were sleeping on the side of the road, it didn’t look much like free trade. Think of the waste of time.

But in addition to ITDS trying to work with the federal processes and standardize those, we also have agreements with the coalitions, the super highway coalitions, we happen to mention one here. This is the new name – the North American Super Highway Coalitions is what [pause], is the group that was previously known as the I-35 Corridor Group. But we are working with the others as well because what we’re trying to do is make sure that the electronic processes that we’ve put in place at the borders are acceptable to the states and that the same technologies that can be used at the borders will also be used by the states to collect tolls, to asses the use of the highways with in those states, for the purposes of assessing taxes having to do with the excise on fuel, and all of that sort of business. And in fact, to implement information systems to streamline their processes with local, federal, and international regulations is one of the main goals of this operation. If we cannot do that, we will have failed miserably because the federal role [pause], it seems to be declining or at least stabilizing as the requirements of states and local governments increase in that environment and to place on the trucking companies, the railroads, and the others additional technological requirements simply because governments can’t agree on what it should be as a standard is not an acceptable solution.

Now lets go to an idea of NATAP. ITDS is the long-range program – fully electronic, 21^st century processing we’re trying to get to, to share data among agencies to trigger the events of the processing within government by recognizing a truck when it approaches the border through some type of technologies and so forth. But in fact we’ve already tried this concept in something called NATAP, the North American Trade Automation Prototype. It is a trilateral effort among Canada, the United States, and Mexico where the concept of standardizing data, sharing it among the countries, being able to construct one set of information and have it be used by not just all the agencies of government within one country but by all three countries is taking the next step. Consider if you will quickly the notion that a truck load of common corn straw brooms are manufactured in the interior of Mexico and they are coming to somewhere in the United States, or traversing the United States and going to Canada. The fact that the truck crosses the border does not change the quantity of those brooms, the definition of them, the value of them, or anything else but if you see the process that has to go on in satisfaction of Mexican export requirements, U.S. import requirements, you wouldn’t believe it. You wouldn’t believe the cost and the changes of just defining the goods that are required by the governments, so the notion of NATAP was take one set of records, agree to what that information is, and let both governments use the same record. One of the things that does instantly if we’re able to do that is it totally standardizes the trade records among the countries and when we sit down to negotiate free trade principles, the balance of trade better damn sure match.

The conditions that we’re presented with today in the diplomatic arena when we go to negotiate free trade is there’s always billions of dollars of differences between what Mexico says they export to the United States and what we said we imported from Mexico. And that’s only because there’s a tremendous difference in how the goods are stated on each side of the border. So the notion of using a standard record takes all of that away and makes the lives, we hope, of the negotiators and the principles on which free trade are constructed to be a lot more easily performed. So the idea here is that we will in fact have standard among the three countries. It did demonstrate, we’ve had this operating for a couple of years in a very, very limited environment on both the U.S. / Mexico border and the U.S. / Canadian border, it did demonstrate the benefits of harmonized trade processes in common data, codes, and syntax – all three governments were pleased with the results of this. The prototype tested the DSRC technology for automating land border ports. Unfortunately, the conditions under which we tested these were not optimal, putting it kindly, and the performance was poor of the DSRC environment. It was not satisfactory at all. However, there are reasons for that, that we should be cautious in how we approach this evaluation and I think you’ll learn more of this if you’ll talk to Bill Knoll when he has his session. We did not get consistent reading of trip load numbers, we did not [pause], they did not consistently write to the transponders. This is a read / write requirement in this environment. Reliability was inadequate. Significant number of crossings were undetected. And it did not support multimodal ITDS requirements.

Now let’s go to the requirements that we actually have established. Now these are functional requirements, these are not technological or technical requirements.

Basically what we’re saying is we have to have the capability to perform multiple reads of the transportation conveyance as it is working through the border process. We have to have an advance read, a decision read, an exit read. It has to be controlled in this environment and in very close quarters. One of the problems is you can get a lot of crosstalk with this technology and it can be confusing in this environment. But it needs to have the ability [pause], we need to have the ability to read within very narrow geographical environments on several occasions what the status of a shipment is, and there are other requirements that I will draw to your attention. Yesterday we finished discussions with the immigration and naturalization services, the treasury department, and the customs services within treasury, the justice department and the immigration service that’s within the justice department, are the primary directors of border activities. When you cross a border you’ll notice you’ll either see an immigration inspector or you’ll see a customs inspector, it’s one of those two. And we finished our discussions yesterday and the notion of an oral declaration and an authentication capability for that oral declaration is primary among our requirements. That, of course, was not satisfied by the DSRC installations we had at the borders.

So, going to the next slide you’ll see the next issues are just typical, I mean there’s [pause], this isn’t so significant and different from any other functional requirements. Those are fairly standard. In summary, I want to point out that what we’re looking for [pause], we’re actually looking at technologies ourselves that could support multimodal and fully electronic border operations. But the requirement for an oral declaration dictates the use of voice communication medium, such as cellular telephone capabilities. Somewhere in there we have to get this capability installed. And we’re finding in our own investigations that the most promising technologies still seem to be in the experimental stages. It looks like we’ve reached beyond the technologies that are put together at least in one set of instruments that are available on the market. So, I leave as a challenge to this body the fact that if we’re to enter the 21^st century and behave as the major trading nation that we are and lead the rest of them in the direction of what it is will be required for border activities, it looks like we have some work to do on the technology side and on the government side, organizing ourselves to standardize our processes and have the technologies that will support it. Thank you very much.

Walton: Excellent, excellent opportunity for us – challenging program. The next speaker and last in this session is Frank Hassler. The topic is Department of Transportation hazardous materials. Frank is Director of Strategic Programs and Resource Planning for the DOT Volpe Center. As many of you know, Volpe is an element of research and special programs administrations, RSPA, of USDOT. It’s located in Cambridge. And his office provides strategic planning business development resource management support to the Center’s senior management. And he also serves as the Executive Agency Agent for the technology committee of the national defense transportation association. He has a wide variety of background experiences in this area we’ve asked him to address the topic of hazardous materials. Frank.

Hassler: Thanks, Mike. I know you told me it was my job to talk and their job to listen, but after lunch is a tough time and if they get through before I do, I’ll understand.

Al Roberts was going to give the talk but asked me to take on the chore for him, and in the process to try to put the hazmat example in the larger context that might be of some interest to the community. Mike Wolfe’s paper in general outlined a number of trends that I agree with completely. And he used a number of biological metaphors in the process – words like niche, and mature, and intelligent. But he never used a specific word evolution. He spoke from a scientific framework based on physical science and engineering, one that the Volpe Center is quite comfortable with and in fact brings to bear on almost everything it does. Carl Seiberlich went a little bit further and spoke about evolution and indeed characterized the evolution of the transportation system in some major terms that we use at the center as well.

All complex systems have a physics and a chemistry and people generally accept that. They don’t however as widely accept the proposition that all complex systems have a biology as well. Evolution is the central biological theme and I use it in what I’m going to present – not as a metaphor but as a scientific reality. And looking around the room, and all the people and the organizations involved in the process of spreading intermodal freight identification technology, it’s clear that there’s no one organization and no one person in charge. It’s happening, of the coming, an evolution if you will, and the question really is will it be a blind evolution or can we guide it in some sense and if so how?

In the remarks I’ll make, the principle logic are shown on the first five bullets of that chart. And I will illustrate them with a couple of slides and then come the particular issue of hazardous materials in the form of a couple of studies the Volpe Center did for the Office of Hazardous Materials Safety and try to wrap up with a little discussion of strategies for accelerating the changes and directions that we’d like to see happen.

Transportation systems are the systems that provide for the flow of material, energy, and the people that make up the society. The process of evolution is a very straight forward one, specialization in progressive improvement in efficiency and effectiveness as time passes. And it’s governed by a number of issues from the microscopic scales of stability of the application and the technology and it’s ability to thrive in a particular and limited niche, all the way up to the large scale pressures that are brought to bear on it and guide the evolution and change over long periods of time. Those systems that survive the vicissitudes of the historical development will thrive and give rise to ever increasingly useful and effective systems. Those that don’t will fall by the wayside. That’s a predictable process over a long period of time but we’re speaking decades not years. Bob spoke a moment ago about leading into the 21^st century. That’s only a couple of years away, and much of the change that is going to take place in this domain will take a decade or two to be manifest. The key point is I think that the evolutionary path ultimately leads to seamless intermodal freight movement from origin to destination.

There is a relentless pressure for improvement and efficiency and effectiveness. A hundred years from now, unless we have global disasters, three times the current world population will consume four times the material, employ five times the ton miles of transportation, at seven times the energy cost. If we can figure out how to do all that at the same time without poisoning ourselves in the process. That inexorable growth has been addressed in the Department of Transportation in a number of ways. Recently Deputy Secretary Downey has pointed out that you can’t pave your way out of congestion, and the consequence of that statement is that advanced control technologies are the key. Ken Wykle asked for a fifty year vision in his opening remarks – I would submit that the vision is logistic flow control. We have flow control today in an advanced way in the air traffic control system where it’s the vehicles themselves that we are controlling the flows of in order to make the maximum use of network and vehicle capacity. Logistics flow control controls the stuff, not the vehicles it travels on and the advanced logistics program in DARPA really are aimed at achieving that long-range vision. There are four pillars to flow control – capturing the network of intent in an incredibly diverse system is the starting point; monitoring the current state of the system with RF ID technology is a second major element; being able to race ahead and forecast problem areas in the upcoming timeslots where we can invoke interventions to correct the most difficult problems is the third and fourth element. Those elements today are best realized in the extended air traffic management system that the Volpe Center has built for the FAA. And those of you who want to see a national system going global that does that in the hear-and-now are invited to come to the Center and take a look at it in its R&D environment.

As we strive to carry more stuff further and faster we increasingly get in our own way and the only way out of it is flow control. RF ID technology is a necessary component of it, but not sufficient - the system needs all four pillars.

The technology is a young and vigorously evolving technology - much of it in the first wave of invention and diversification. It has a high infant mortality rate, it has high costs, it has short lifetimes, it’s expensive. There are many examples of commercialized versions in the second and third waves and beyond, and out of that will emerge the long-term winners and losers. There will emerge a robust program of standardization and evermore generations of new technology.

The systems problems revolve around the issues of passive versus active tagging technologies and the question of how much of the data the system needs is on the tag and how much of the data is in the system. We’re betting for commercial applications that most of the data of importance is in the system. The key operational concepts that will go one way or the other are largely governed by the assumptions made on the subject of assured communications. And in that capacity the military systems approach and the commercial systems approach have been steadily diverging for some period of time now. The military invoking the requirements of uncertainty of battle to require the data on the tag. The commercial folk going largely with the license plate technology.

To guide the evolution of the system we have to selectively reduce the barriers and enhance the benefits of the system. One thing that is being thrust upon us increasingly is to accelerate the whole evolution process of deploying technology, making the most of what’s already installed, learning from our mistakes. To do that we’re going to have to make major strides in advancing the component of cooperation between all the players in the game. Government can in fact play a useful role in the science and technology domain to promote solutions that will be commercially viable and to help spread the information about what works and what doesn’t. And together we can begin to steer the evolution strategically to emphasize those technologies that are of greatest common interest between government and industry. The previous speaker spoke, for example, to the domain of border crossings as a fertile area for collaboration.

Basically, the evolutionary process is normal and the role of technology innovation depends on what’s needed, what’s possible, and what’s practical. We’re responding today clearly to the diversity of low end application needs. What’s possible – there’s large consensus about things that might be beneficial. The real problem we have is coming to grips with what’s really practical.

In the hazardous materials transport area, the Center has done a couple of recent studies on information technology and emergency response looking at these issues, and the bottom line is that the improvements in accessing centralized non-specific shipment response information is still the most practical thing to be done widely and shared. In the question of the role of GPS and telemetry of GPS data for emergency response, the conclusions were that on the basic of HAZMAT benefit cost alone, the benefits are too small and uncertain to justify the mandate. We looked at a number of scenarios for midrange large-scale trucking operations and rail operations and for HAZMAT benefit cost alone the ratios ranged from about 1.6 to 3.6, and given the normal inflation in benefits and underestimating of cost that’s just not enough. But at the same time, we know that there are applications and we’ve been heavily involved in them with the military and some of the other government agencies on the use of dedicated GPS satellite telemetry for tracking things like chemical munitions shipments worldwide or the safe return to the U.S. of spent fuel rods.

Three basic strategies for acceleration. The first involves establishing forums like this for information sharing about who’s doing what, what’s working, what isn’t and why? The second has to do with programmatic catalysts for directing the evolution of the technology. In particular, there are some examples in the DOT’s past – cooperative research initiatives to finance the systematic examination of what works and why, and what doesn’t and why, and it offers a platform for the supplemental investment of common interest to both public and private participants. Finally, there is a national strategy evolving in transportation research and development. As part of that we need to define a critical taxonomy for research in intermodal freight identification and develop a broad consensus on what the critical research issue are. We need to make all three work together.

And for those of you who would like to continue the dialog on-line, we’d like to hear from you. Thank you.

Walton: Thank you Frank. I’m sorry that we have such a tight schedule we have to adhere to. All the topics would be very interesting to continue. Let me move very quickly and introduce the next moderator for the session so we can make a transition, and as we’re doing that let me point out that Bob Ehinger may not be able to stay with us. There may be some questions that you might wish to make of Bob before he leaves. Frank I believe will be around during the rest of today and tomorrow. But fist let me introduce Margaret D. Blum. Maggie is the Associate Administrator for Port, Intermodal and Environmental Activities for MARAD. As many of you know, she’s been in that position for several years, since October `94. Previous positions include Director of the Office of Maritime Labor and Training, and Director of the Office of Acquisitions. We’re very fortunate to have her with us. She will be moderating the next panel. So Maggie if you wouldn’t mind coming forward. She may want her panelists to come forward and as we’re going through this shuffle anyone have questions of Bob before we lose him?

Walton: Yes. If you do, if you’d work your way to one of the microphones I’d appreciate it.

Member: I’m Doris Bautch with MARAD. I have a question for you Bob. You talked about NATAP addressing the land border crossings, well sea ports are also border crossings. When do you anticipate that you will involve with sea ports?

Ehinger: The test that we performed were essentially in the border environment – truck and rail. But the test that will be going on in terms of the sea port should occur late in 1999. The current schedule identifies ports on the west coast that will be the first ports to get this [pause], the test of the ITDS concepts in 1999.

Ehinger: I’m not exactly certain. It’s either San Francisco or L.A., and there is a debate on some of the aspects of where that might end up. But those are the two are the primary contenders.

Walton: One last question. Anyone? Yes, and this will be the last unfortunately – for Bob anyway. If you are on Maggie’s panel, come on down.

Member: Ramone Grijalva, Signal Processing Systems. Bob Ehinger could you comment on the commonality of requirements for CVO in the future and rail for border crossing?

Ehinger: Well the only thing I can say is that the identification of the conveyance is the primary issue in terms of the border crossing and it appears to us that the tagging concept, the concept of having tags that are commonly available and some version of the DSRC sort of approach is probably what could work in both environments. If you’re talking about the comparison of one environment to another, it looks like that could work very well for us. We already have had some little bit of success testing the tagging in the rail environment and in fact the rail environment is farther along in having uniform tagging standards. Everyone seems to know that, that’s been around for a while. So the ability to read a rail car, identification of the movement of a series of rail cars making up a train is not very difficult in our view. It’s more difficult if you get into the truck environment where you have a lot of different arrangements. The notion of having a container that’s aboard some flatbed that’s being pulled by a motivating unit of some type can be very different in the trucking environment from a rail environment. So, we believe that it can happen – that there is a comparability of the kinds of identification methodologies can be used in both.

Walton: Good. Thank you. Again, appreciate both Frank and Bob and their presentations. Please join me in expressing our appreciations.

Walton: Maggie, please.

Blum: I would like to take my opportunity to also give my thanks to the many long hours that people put into this effort, and I think I’ve already learned my things I need to in order to say it’s really been worthwhile. I was listening to Mr. Pavlick’s statement and I think I’ve already gone there. We are the last panel prior to the breakout sessions so our goal is to keep you awake, make it short, and rev you up. And its all on standards. Many people have referred to standards and they may be one of the jumping off places in one of the issues. But knowing the standards on the things that we would want to identify is the interest from the private industry, and so as we’ve had before us we have a varied panel of different industry specialists. I think you’ll find them very interesting and informative. We’re trying to keep it short, even shorter than Mike has kept his sessions, so that we can start the interplay among the different members in ideas and things that can be done in this area.

The discussion topics are standards now in place, potential areas of consideration, technology gaps, issues and problems, and future trends. We’re talking about harmonization and interoperability issues. We have six perspectives. Andrew Friend will be speaking first. He’s with the Union Pacific Railroad and will be giving us background on EDI. He’s the only one that’s allowed extra time because the railroad has a background and a system in place. Nancy McLaughlin is the [pause], is here as the representative for IANA, Intermodal Association of North America. She’s the Senior Manager with Conrail. She is to give us focus on the kinds of standards that the business community needs in EDI. Bill Nolle has spent the last twelve years working on automation-related activities. He is currently the U.S. Project Leader in negotiations with Canada and Mexico for the development of the North American Trade Automation Prototype which we’ve heard about. More specific questions can be addressed to him. Larry Sposi is representing TOPAS which is the Terminal Operators Port Authority Subcommittee, and they have used for the past ten years public-private partnerships to implement ITS. And so he will give us a frontline look. Ed Coyle is Deputy Chief of Distribution, you know this is a government name, Deputy Chief of Distribution, Defense Logistics Support Command at Ft. Belvoir. But he’s real important.

Blum: He is going to give us the military’s perspective and was introduced previously as the Program Manager. Rick Schuman is Director of System Applications at ITS. He will be talking about the Dedicated Short Range Communications technologies and what they are working on towards interoperability. That’s my five minutes and I will now turn it over to Andrew.

Friend: I’m Andrew Friend. I’m with the Union Pacific Railroad and I’ve been involved in automatic equipment identification, AEI, with the Class 1 carriers since the early nineties. I don’t have a technical background. My background is exploiting technology so when they brought me in the assumption was made by my railroad – the Southern pacific, at the time – that with all the brains working on it, that eventually the hardware / software components were going to work. And when we joined the AEI community, my big push was what can we make it do for us. AEI for the railroads, I would "guestimate" that the railroads have probably spent a half billion dollars on AEI already. Those companies who have mostly Class 1’s that have taken advantage of the AEI technology over the last few years have an average rate-of-return on investment less than one year. If they’re not aggressive, it’s definitely less than two years.

AEI investment for the railroads was based almost exclusively on locomotive utilization – a two point something million piece of equipment if we’re able to track it, report on it, and enhance our utilization of the equipment, that’s how we pay for AEI. In the beginning of AEI it was [pause], there was a lot of input from the intermodal community – the container ship operators, and terminal operators, and so forth. In fact the very beginning of AEI was based on input given to us directly by the international community in the area of intermodal groups and shippers, and so forth.

Our payback again was on locomotives. We pay for all of our systems, all half a billion dollars worth without reading one container. So what I’m here to talk about is the steal wheel portions of automatic equipment identification. We went through several stages in the development. We’ve even published the standard that I think is going to be available to you when you go into your workgroups is the S918 recommended practices. In the S918 there’s the definition of the tag, of the technology, of its utilization, its placement, and the technical issues involved.

We have specialty applications out there we’re not finished exploiting it yet. We keep striving since we have this infrastructure out there, there’s some two-thousand wayside AEI stations throughout the United States. Since we have this infrastructure out there you want to continue to exploit it. Eventually, it’ll probably be one of the biggest contributions to the railroad as the railroads continue to cut back and downsize, the requirement for clean data and timely and accurate data is intensified. We have the Union Pacific, just to give out some numbers on AEI sites, has over 650 AEI sites on its system. We share data, that means we receive fees from another 80 AEI sites that come from foreign carriers – the other railroads. AEI sites are installed in certain places, the majority of them are at mainline installations. We have them integrated at hump operations, locomotive facility operations, yard scale terminals, and so forth. I mean, they’re everywhere. If you go out on the railroad you’re going to see how they use AEI, you generally don’t have to go very far.

I want to review this for a second. The benefits from AEI were developed in, and I’ll just list a few of the areas were we experienced the benefits, we experienced the benefits in dispatching, in train movement, in train movement reporting, car, end of train, and locomotive, that’s the majority of all of our equipment. The ability to obtain clean consists, the terminal performance turn times within a rail yard, route utilization, joint trackage operations – from the extensive mergers that have gone on recently part of the requirements of the mergers were that we would allow our competitors on our trackage and that trackage then becomes a joint operation. Both railroads need to have information, timely data from the same piece of trackage. We put AEI sites out there, the AEI sites report to both hosts so in the shared data concept or centralized data concept, that the same data is coming from the same source and going to several hosts. We also use it for arrival and departure of train pick-ups and set-out, reporting what happened on-line. Clean list logic, readjusting the standing order of equipment after departing terminal. Industry placement and release. Interchange reporting, equipment location, work order reporting. There’s a considerable list of things that we do with AEI. AEI is an integral part of the Class 1 carriers’ infrastructure and their ability to move forward.

I might add that this is one of the first meetings that I’ve come to of its kind where the finger wasn’t pointed directly at the railroads as being the weak link in the chain.

Friend: I figured a lot of that to the installment of AEI on the railroads. If you can put in on a container and you can tell us which car it’s on, we can tell you where that car is. And we do that much better today than we have ever done it before, using this technology.

Let me just whip through some of these specialty applications that we have. We integrated AEI into wayside detectors, hot box detectors, hot wheel detectors, journals, slide detectors, gate operations, and so forth. Dynamic tags reading the fuel level of locomotives on the fly. Intermodal gate operations, we found that since the majority of the containers are not tagged we’ve had to supplement the AEI applications with optical character recognition. We have a couple locations where we do that. It seems to be working out well. We seem to overlap and give us fairly good coverage in the mid-nineties percentage-wise.

We do locomotive facility inventory. This is an important feature with AEI because one of the downside of AEI is that the equipment has to be moving in order for you to get the information you’re looking for. Now that we’re moving AEI applications into the yard, we can actually monitor the movement or makeup of a train within a yard and therefore if things were perfect would eliminate the need for wayside detectors outside of the yard to correct the consists the second time.

We do both load-outs intermodal applications. We integrate into GIS – geographic information systems – for mapping and graphical representation of AEI data. We have notification systems to our customers. I’ve spoken with one gentleman here who uses EDI information but he validates the EDI information if the indicator comes across that the information was generated by AEI site then it’s twice as powerful, twice as useful, as had it come from a manual input.

We do tag help monitoring, site help monitoring. You’ll find that the Class 1 carriers have already installed AEI readers at all the rail border crossings. You can’t get out of the United States without going by one by rail.

Our database users - I’m just whipping through these things, some of these things won’t make any sense. Our customer service center is obviously the highest user of the data and tracking equipment. Our dispatch center uses it to move cars, track trains, size of trains, speed of trains. The marketing department uses it to determine whether or not they’re in a good market, if they’re making or losing money based on equipment turn times. The communications, mechanical, both operations are operating field people who all have access to one database and that was touched on earlier as all AEI information is consolidated in one database. All users have access to the same data at the same time.

I’m just whipping through this again, but here’s the most important thing that I have to offer is – the Class 1 carriers, the railroads themselves, have paid for the AEI infrastructure that exists in the railroad today. This is important because when we first started we had the Class 1 carriers, Class 2 and Class 3, short line carriers, terminal operators, customers, leasing companies. No one would stand up and say I get a benefit from this, I’ll help you pay for it. What happened was the Class 1 carriers paid for everything. They paid for everyone’s tagging, paid for all the tag applications, did all their own equipment, and so forth. So that’s going to be an issue that I think this group, or somewhere down the line is going to be an output from this, is who is going to pay for it. And I want to applaud the Class 1 carriers for stepping forward and having the ability to see the future and see that the benefit to them was going to be significant enough that we would pay to have everyone’s equipment tagged. We did stop short of containers.

Friend: But we do some chassis on the way. What helped us also, was a big contributor and motivator for us, is that the equipment tagging was mandated. Exploiting the information and the technology was not, tagging the equipment was mandated and the way we did that was through the AER. The AER said that you could not send a piece of equipment through interchange that did not have AEI tags on it after a certain date. Okay, so that was the club that we used. Of course the standardization was reached. The quality of first-time application of tagging is critical because, like a container, you may never see that car again and never have a chance to correct your mistake. We had a users group made up of everybody who wanted to participate. There was maybe twelve or fifteen of us at any given time, so you have ten times that representation. And we had, again going back to AER, we had a centralized body that was able to sort everything out and organize the AEI applications for us and that was the AER.

So, that’s a lot of just general type of information. I’d be more than happy to answer any questions either one-on-one or later in another discussion. But basically that’s what the Class 1’s have done with AEI to date. Thank you.

Blum: It is the copy for the standards for the railroad. There is another set of standards that will be there that the person who works on standards at the Department of Transportation has given me which is [pause – shuffling of paper], so these are the ones that will be put into each one of the rooms. They are all of the intermodal standards, internationally because we are talking not just domestically we’re talking about international issues whenever we’re talking about these. Nancy.

McLaughlin: Hello, I’m Nancy McLaughlin and I’m with the railroad formerly called Conrail, and I’m representing the Intermodal Association of North America today – IANA. And I am a chair of a committee – Electronic Business Solutions committee – that was put together, and like any good committee we have a mission statement and objectives of what we’re trying to accomplish. And what we really came together for about four years ago was to really represent the intermodal industry. EDI standards, other committees were really focused on rail. Carload shipments, carload customers and not on intermodal. So, any initiatives by the intermodal industry were dying because there was not enough of a voice behind them, and that was really what our role was. The other thing that we were trying to do is work with other committees within the IANA organization to identify their needs and work with them so that we could identify operational processes, business processes that didn’t have a means of which to electronically communicate between the various players in an intermodal move and see if we could work with them to streamline the process, to be able to develop a way to communicate electronically and then from there to facilitate the development of new standards, new EDI standards within the various EDI organizations like ANSI in the rail industry. So, that was our mission statement and those are our objectives.

And we broke ourselves up into three subcommittees. We have an education committee which was looking at the needs within the intermodal industry for understanding what EDI or electronic communication is, what it can do for them and what things we can do together. The other was the business process resolution which is working with the other committees to identify areas which we could work with them, and then the standards group who’s job was to put the information together to pass to the standards organizations and facilitate it through that process. So that we had a strong live voice, we had a united voice and were able to get much more done than we had in the past.

As I said, we’ve only been around for about four years and I feel that we had a number of successes. On of the biggest successes I think was on the intermodal safe container act. Legislation came through but the way the legislation was written was geared more toward a very paper process and obviously as railroads and shippers has progressed the processes within the terminal have been more streamlined and then all of a sudden to put this paper process on top of that everyone was alarmed and up in arms how are we going to handle this. So the three committees within IANA were able to identify how the process should work, how the information should be passed. We then brought what we felt was a reasonable approach to the standards organizations so changes could be made to the various transactions sets to support the information within the intermodal safe container act. And then we went about educating the intermodal industry on what they need to do, what changes they need to make, what informational requirements they need. Another success was the universal status message where we’ve had, it says here three, but actually it was four different messages to report on where shipments are and give the status on the shipments. And so customers were having to support the various types of messages from the different players within their existing transportation entities within an intermodal move and obviously there is a cost associated with that. So we worked together to come up with one message that all the different providers, transportation providers, could use to provide status information to a shipper.

One of the other things we’ve done is a technology survey. And this was really to find out who was doing what within the intermodal industry. What were the railroads doing? What were the steamship line and the IMC’s and the truckers doing with technology? And that in turn caused other things to happen. The other was a transaction matrix. Once we find out what type of things that we’re doing with technology, what type of EDI transactions do they support? There’s a lot out there and I think it helped to focus on what things we’re doing now and are those things that we want to do in the future? And one of the other important things is we’ve been continuing to run EDI panel discussions at various IANA conferences. And the goal there was to portray this as not a "techy" issue. This is a business issue. And we didn’t want to get in bits and bytes. We wanted to talk about what this brings to business. What we can do together as an industry and how we can take advantage of this. And so one of our goals all along was not to have a number of systems people on this committee but really to have the business people who would know the operational processes and what we need to do to streamline that.

We now have some current projects and several of these are [pause], have been, really been pushed from our transaction matrix in our technology survey. And one of the things that we found, and I think it was similar to what Mr. Pavlick said earlier today, while the railroads and the steamship lines and the IMC’s have been participating in electronic commerce for quite some time, there really is this black hole. And that is the drayers. They are not participating for a number of reasons. We’re not participating with them. We’re not sharing information with the drayers and we need to look at if we are going to move further with intelligent systems then everyone has to be participating. And how do we facilitate that?

One of the things we’re working on now is the transaction set guidelines. And that is setting up guidelines for how we communicate information with the drayers and from the drayers. So one of the stumbling blocks we felt was some concerns, since very few people are doing that, how do we get the people to start taking that first step? How do we pass the information? What information needs to be passed between them? And we hope that would help to reduce confusion and also to reduce the implementation timeframe for EDI.

The other is a guide to EDI benefits and a how-to manual. I think most of us have been beaten to death on what the benefits of EDI are, but we’re also looking at if some of them were trying to sell this in their own organization – giving them some guidance on how to propose EDI. What they can use it for. Giving them certain criteria. How much it costs in general to send EDI versus how much it costs to handle paper. What can they expect software to cost and hardware, what can they expect? Value added network – if we’re going to go through a value added network. Communications charges – what can they expect them to be? You know it’s one thing to say it’s cheaper, it’s better, but really when it comes out what are the brass tax, what is it really going to cost them to do that. So they have a better understanding. And as well, a how-to manual. How do you go out and buy the software? Where do you go? How do you contact a value added network? What things should you be aware of? Some of the pitfalls of some of the things to be aware of. So again, we can make this process easier. And we’ve had a number of specialty drayers saying they’re not sure how to take that first step. And hopefully that will help them in that process.

And we’ve also had a committee who was working with other committees within the organization, at IANA organization, focusing on specific processes to eliminate paperwork. And EDI only works if we can get the paperwork out of the process and while we have been doing say shipment status messages for eons, there are still people who want all of that and still the paper, and how do we get away from that? How do we wean ourselves form the paper? So, as you can see our focus has really been within the last year in this organization or two, how do we get everyone on the playing field? I mean, everyone says we need a level playing field from which to grow, but we still have a lot of people back in the locker room who have not come out on to the playing field and we need to get them there. And you know, if we want to continue to grow an intelligent transportation systems, I think this is one of the very steps to take. Thank you.

Blum: You did exactly what we’ve been asking which is put the real issue on the table with no emotionalism but these are the things we have to deal with. I had not given the name of the ITS standards manager at DOT. I’d like to introduce Michael Shagrin. Would you stand up? As far as standards and information, DOT in this area here’s someone to go and see.

Nolle: Nancy, I can make this very fast and just refer back to Bob Ehinger’s notes and so just sit down. Bob did talk about ITDS and something called NATAP and I just want to fill in a few of the blanks that Bob mentioned in his presentation. Again, NATAP was an effort growing out of NAFTA to harmonize and standardize processes and procedures in documents of the three countries – Canada, the United States, and Mexico. So, that’s exactly what we did. We came up with a standardized data set that all three countries could use for import, export, or transit. More importantly is that we tried to integrate this into the processes in each country. Because remember what happens when merchandise is imported, there’s several things going on. You’re clearing merchandise for customs purposes plus food and drug, there’s people involved that have to go through immigration, there’s transportation involved that has to go through either FHWA or FAA or the Coast Guard. The danger that we have is that we can design these slick systems, any one of these systems by themselves. I can have the fastest customs system in the world, but if it doesn’t handle immigration or it doesn’t handle toll, it’s failed because the truck is still stopped. So I think not only did we standardize in NATAP, but also tried to harmonize and integrate what was going on within the federal trade agencies.

We tried some new technologies also. We have standardized data in EDIFACT format. I know EDIFACT is not a favorite of some people, but that’s what we used as the emerging international standard. We used the internet among the trade community for the transmission of data among the trade – from a Canadian exporter to a U.S. import broker for example. We also used the internet then for the trade community to communicate with the government. And of course with the internet comes encryption, security, and encryption. And we did employ encryption – 128 bit encryption. It was rather interesting in this respect because if any one you have tried to get encryption out of the country, it has to be exported, especially to Mexico, with that export license. And I was in the position of actually having to apply as a federal agency to the Department of Commerce for an export license. And with apologies to anyone from Commerce who is here, it’s a rather laborious process. So it was rather interesting to be on the other side and deal with the federal government as a trader which is what I was in this case. So that was an eye opener for me. So we used the internet, we used encryption, and we did employ DSRC. What we did with the NATAP is that piggybacked onto existing FOT’s – Field Operational Tests – being conducted by the Department of Transportation.

We did this in Buffalo, Detroit, Laredo, El Paso, Nogales, and Oti Mesa. Now here’s the challenge in doing this, because remember it’s not just the United States. Because that merchandise is coming from Canada or from Mexico, or going into Canada or into Mexico. So we’re not in this by ourselves. So not only are we trying to integrate what happens in the United States, we’re trying to extend the same thing to our trading partners in Canada and Mexico. So if you think it’s tough dealing with U.S. customs and U.S. DOT and U.S. immigration, try throwing into this mix SCT – the Secretary of Communications and Transportation – in Mexico, Ontario Ministry of Transport, the Federal Ministry of Transport in Canada, New York State DOT. I mean, all these people were a part of it.

But this is what you have to do to guarantee success. To actually guarantee this interoperability. I recall someone from, with apologies for anyone who’s here from New York, from New York DOT, saying what do I care what happens in Texas? Well you’d better because the truck’s going to go from Montreal to Monterrey, and it’s going to go through mountain New York and you’d better make sure that whatever we’re doing is consistent. We had visions of having a truck go through with sixteen different devices plastered all over the windshield in order to meet all of the requirement of the different countries and localities. So integration and cooperation is very important in this. So, did it work? Well, yeah it did. Quite honestly it was very successful. It was a prototype. We were just experimenting – can we do this? Data standardization import and export, yeah. It was there. And Bob mentioned earlier, it’s commercially-based. And yeah, it did work. The internet with encryption – seemed to be fine. What we did with DSRC… well, here’s a profound statement – when it worked, it worked.

Keep in mind what we did here was a prototype. And as a prototype, you don’t have full systems installed. There is limited money. We were experimenting with it. But there are just some cautions that we learned and if we’re going to do this in a real system, here’s what we need to have. We certainly need reliability. Bob mentioned that in his remarks. The Ambassador Bridge in Detroit – there are ten-thousand trucks a day which cross that bridge and as your reliability goes down, the number of trucks that can’t be processed goes up. So if your talking ninety-five percent reliability, that’s five hundred trucks that may not work. No, clearly not acceptable. So reliability is an issue. A full-scale, real operating system has to have system monitoring. The way we found out NATAP didn’t work is the truck would go to the booth and nothing would happen. And we figured, oh I guess it’s not working. So, you need something more than that. You need to be able to monitor the system to know when it’s down. You need diagnostics. If it doesn’t work, why isn’t it working. And of course you need backup because we envision this as being the only electronic arrival mechanism for conveyances – no paper, fully electronic. No in the prototype if it didn’t work, we could go oh well we’ll just give you a piece of paper. But what happens if there’s no more paper? So any systems we have in place have to work. They have to be reliable.

The devices themselves, we used two types – Mark IV on the U.S. / Canada border, and Hughes on the U.S. / Mexico border. They did prove to be interoperable. We took some Hughes devices and ran them through the Peace Bridge and the Ambassador Bridge, in Buffalo and Detroit, and they worked in both locations. And likewise, we took some from up north and moved them down south. So we did demonstrate interoperability. We demonstrated multiple functions too because the devices were not only able to meet the NATAP or ITDS requirements, but they were also able to collect toll. That was clearly a success.

One of the things we did have problems with is that we’re not using fixed tags. Now keep in mind, a truck crossing the border may cross the border several times in one day. And as such, each trip has to be uniquely identified. And there were different methodologies for encoding what we call the trip load number on there, there were barcodes, there were hand-held units. Some of them were directly linked to PC’s. An enterprising Mexican company actually had a wire strung from a PC through the ceiling, out the window, over a pole, and out to the loading dock. So, anyway.

This was one of the difficulties is how do we program one of these devices? There were some power problems. Some of the batteries on the devices just did not work. The life of these things was guaranteed to be longer, but they weren’t. Again, it’s a prototype – these were all experimental. But these have to corrected. The other is that, as far as the technology, we did select DSRC but there are certain carriers who are beyond that. There using on-board computer systems, and GPS, and things of that sort. And quite frankly, these folks said well we really don’t want to this. For us to go back to a transponder is a step backwards. So any system that is in place is going to have to accommodate DSRC plus other things that are already out there, being used by the industry.

So I think, in summary, what ever is out there has to be reliable. Has to be interoperable. Easy to operate. And of course, at a reasonable cost. Very quickly, if you would like more information on this we have a website and I’ll give you the address, you can check in there if you have any questions. Rather than tying up the group here, send the questions to the website and someone will get back to you if you have any comments or questions. It’s www.itds.treas.gov. And we have the evaluation of NATAP. That’s going to be posted there. We have the requirements for all this. All that’s is posted not only for NATAP but also ITDS. And as I’ve said, there’s an e-mail feature if you have any questions just send an e-mail and someone will get back to you. Thank you.

Blum: Larry it’s time for a dance.

Sposi: I’m being asked to do this in five minutes – we’ll see. We usually talk fast in New York, I’ll try to speed it up even more.

Sposi: I have about five bullets and I’ll go through them very quickly and hopefully you do have questions and answers. But I’d like to step back a little bit to let you know what we’ve been doing in the port because as we’re talking today about cooperation between private and public sector – well New York did that, we started that back in 1986. We found out early on in order to implement any technology you have to bring the private sector in and get their cooperation and buy in or no matter what you implement whether it’s good or not, you’re just not going to get the cooperation. So we understood that early on. And having said that, one of the things we did was our EDI system which is called Aces. Now again we went out to the community and formed a working committee of ocean carriers, terminal operators, brokers, and forwarders, and had them basically design the functional specifications for the system. And they had the buy in and it worked. And where other ports were spending five to twenty-five million dollars, we spent two-hundred-fifty thousand. And today we have the most widely used EDI system in the U.S., including other port authorities participating in this. Why? Because our customers who come into New York also call at other ports. We understood that and we crossed that bridge of being protective of trying to set up a system of just the port itself, we opened up the network. Again, because we listened to the private sector.

One of the other things we did then was set up sea-link ID card. Now again, in the port of New York you have six million terminal operators. Each of those main terminal operators were setting up their own ID system. Well, you know with the truckers as they are today, you have a lot of owner-operators and depending on which trucking company your driver worked for and what facility he went to, he’d have a wallet full of ID cards just to try to get in and out. We went to the terminal operators, again going to the private sector, and say listen – we need to have cooperation, we need to have you come together to agree on one ID card for truckers access to all the different facilities. We got the cooperation and today we have five of the six terminal operators using the ID card. And we now have twenty-eight thousand drivers representing sixteen hundred trucking companies. So again, we were successful only because we brought the private sector in early on and worked with them to develop the system.

Now we get to TOPAS which is one of the reasons I was invited to come here. About in April, Gordon Fink came to our meeting. We invited him to come to the TOPAS meeting in Boston and he made a very good presentation – it opened up a lot of eyes. I have to say that really TOPAS [pause], most of the members didn’t know what ITS was – they do now. And in fact we have another Port Savannah’s here from the TOPAS group to sit in on this. And we’re going to work closely with ITS now to have an open dialog with all the ports and terminals to make sure that we are active in working with the ITS, the ITS people. One thing I like about TOPAS – I get to choose which port to have the meetings at and for some reason we have the meetings in Savannah in March, we go down to New Orleans at certain other times of the year. One of the side benefits of the group meeting twice a year at a different port.

And last – ITS initiatives. We’re working right now with the I-95 Corridor Coalition committee. One of the things, cause we were so focussed on just getting information and moving it from the ocean to the ship to the marine terminal facility and get them out the gate. And once they’re out the gate, they’re on their own. So, we’re looking to expand what we’re trying to do with information technology and work with the I-95 Corridor to set-up some smart systems for a couple of reasons. One, for detecting congestions or accidents to be able to provide some smart systems on the highway to allow truckers to know that if you’re going into Allenhook don’t come in over the Goldsboro maybe you have to go over the Bayonne bridge. Things of that sort. To redirect truckers to get in and out of facilities a lot quicker. Also to, and this is breaking outside of the box a little bit, maybe set up right at the toll booth gate process booths an advanced notice for the terminal operators so that they know when a truck is coming up the highway to come into their facility instead of having that trucker just show up at the gate and now they have to react quickly and say where we going to put this? So, we’re working closely and again went back to the private sector – I’ve got a major marine terminal operator who’s agreed to participate in a pilot test. We have a trucker group called the Bi-state Harbor Carriers and they’ll represent the truckers for their input. And we’re going to work out a pilot test and work closely with the I-95 Corridor Coalition committee and hopefully we can start to expand some applications beyond our gate facilities so that the benefits will be derived from both our main terminal operators and the trucking community itself. That was four and a half minutes, I think. Okay, thank you very much.

Blum: And now we’ll get DOD. Ed.

Coyle: Thank you, Maggie. I have to start this off by saying that Maggie is probably the cruelest woman in DOD. Because I am the most enthusiastic guy in the Defense Department, everyday I go to work I’m really, really happy because I think I’m doing something that’s very exciting, it’s going to facilitate some transportation and supply change in business process that I have seen needed change for the twenty-five years I have been with the Defense Department. Next slide, please.

In the opening remarks today General Wykle, Administrator Wykle mentioned the four I’s – international, intermodal, intelligent, and interoperative. It hit like a baseball bat. It’s what we’re looking for in the Defense Department. Admiral Seiberlich mentioned the fact that legacy systems were important and it’s important to us. We have wonderful automatic identification, excuse me, logistic systems in the Defense Department. Some are very, very old. We have to figure out a way to operate with those old systems. That’s an eye chart for anyone who wants to study it for a while. Mike Wolfe mentioned the five-layer nesting of data. It’s extremely important to understand that the soldier on the other end of the pipeline wants to know where the part number is. He really doesn’t care where the container is. But it’s also important to understand that we in managing the pipeline want to know when we have an event at a port somewhere in the world, and I’ll get into that in just a second. Robert Clark mentioned that data and information needs to be a byproduct of our normal operations. I’ve yet to see a really successful system be implemented where the information you wanted was not part of the day-to-day operations. When it becomes extra work, it always becomes the last thing that gets done or something that isn’t done particularly well. And then I heard Paul Pavlick say anything that will help me get through the gate faster is something that will probably be worthwhile for me. But until it does something material for me, it really isn’t worth the investment. I can’t see making the investment. And I think you can see where those two comments really are complimentary.

I’m the head of the AIT project. Now that I have spent two minutes of my five. The little triangle up on the top I didn’t think was too important until I heard people talking today. That is the development of a common operational picture for logistics in Defense Department. The bottom layer of that says – see the data. That’s what we’re doing with automatic identification technology. And then as you move up that hierarchy there are operating systems, there are transportation asset control systems, they’re a series of systems that need to work from accurate data so that the leaders that are making decisions in those functional areas can all be working from the same information when they make a decision. Extremely important in the Defense Department’s logistics management system. At the bottom, bottom left excuse me, there’s a [pause], the networking that we’re doing with the global transportation network that the TRANSCOM operates will be bringing in EDI transactions from commercial carriers and they’re starting that process this summer. We’ll be feeding information, the joint total asset visibility, JTAV, that system is one where the users in-theater can go on to the internet today and see material that’s on the way to them, that’s on the way to the guy next door to them. They can get all kinds of information and we can reduce the redundant shipment of material into supply in-theater. It save us money and it improves readiness. As Mr. Emahiser mentioned earlier, we’re doing four prototypes – we’re moving a unit, we’re instrumenting a unit that moves I should say; we’re watching air cargo; sea cargo; and ammunition. We have had some significant near-term successes. We’ve agreed on a two-dimensional bar code that will include supply and transportation information. We have completed a measurement baseline which I’ll talk about in just a second, and we’ve created a business process server. Next slide, please.

Business process server is extremely important. DARPA participated in the development of this, or supported the development. As you look at the AIS’s, our legacy systems is a supply system. That’s where the supply sergeant works and he’s looking for his information. INMARSAT and TCAIMS II, those are also user-based systems. Those are customers looking for information. DECAPS, CAPS 2, and WPS are the consolided aerial port system. TRANSCOM’s system for running military aerial ports, and WPS is the world-wide port system. That’s the one that MTMC uses to control the flow of cargo, DoD export surface cargo, intermodal cargo. So we have transportation and supply and on the business process server can talk to any of those systems and on the other side we see traditional linear bar codes, optical memory cards, radio frequency tags, the whole spectrum of AIT technologies. When we want to introduce a technology we connect it to the business process server and we’re integrated into our legacy systems. Next slide, please.

This is very important. We decided on a military shipping label. In the past, if you worked in the military ten years ago, you got a box that had a label on the front, it has 1348-1’s which are all the supply information - this is the stuff I ordered, that the supply guy can talk to. It had a 1384 which was an ATCMD – the document that we use to control it through the transportation system and then the label itself. It’s all there. If you take the 2-D barcode label – that squiggly stuff in the middle, everyone probably knows what it is – you can read that and get a complete TCMB and supply information for up to ten orders. If it’s more than ten then we also attach an optical memory card so it’s all still there. The most important part for this group is to emphasize what we’re doing in the Defense Department and look at the very bottom sector – it says carrier segment. We’re working with Federal Express, UPS, and consolidated is the first motor carrier that we’re working with. And what we’re attempting to do out of our DoD depots and our shipping locations is to put any proprietary marking, 2-D barcode, whatever matrix device they want to put on there, and we’ll print it on that label and then they can recognize our cargo within their systems and move it as they well please. There will no longer be a Federal Express label. I understand that many commercial firm do that today. The Defense Department is headed there and that probably these will be showing up on packages probably the first of July. Next slide, please.

So we’re driving towards visa PDF417. We didn’t invent a 417. We took what the industry said was there and started using it. You want to give me another minute? Okay, I’m sorry. On measurements, as Mr. Emahiser mentioned, we are doing a prototype. We’ve used tags before. The purpose of the prototype that we’re running to Europe is to use the AIT devices, establish a baseline for what our old business was, our old business processes, measure the effects of the introduction of the AIT into the processes, and then make a decision where DoD should be making their investment in the future. Where do we get the most return? Next slide, please.

That’s it? Oh, okay. The next slide, interestingly enough, showed a comparison of what we’ll be doing at the ports of Bayonne, excuse me, at port Elizabeth and Holland Hook. We have put RF devices there to read RF tags in our cargo that are going through. We’re also, from our business partners Sea-hand and Lykes, we’ll be getting EDI transactions. And what we’ll do when cargo flows through the port, is we will take our RF read, we’ll get the EDI transaction, and we’ll decide if it’s worth our while to continue to instrument ports around the world. Should we do large commercial ports were we have major trading partners, or do those EDI transactions take care of us? Should we [pause], or should we just put those RF reading devices in unimproved ports? A place where DoD goes because of a contingency in operation other than war where we don’t have a significant trading partner that’s a source of data for our needs and our management requirements. We have started the tests. We’re moving the second ACR out of Bosnia. Even as we speak, the first two trains should have been loaded Friday and left Saturday. We will be continuing with that part of the process. July and August timeframe – we will be starting the airlift and sealift portion. We have already captured our baseline data and during the Summer we’ll be looking at the business process improvements so that in the Fall we can put our report together on what AIT has meant to us. Most important thing here is that these are not just ports in the United States. The significant importance to the Defense Department, especially with the Defense Department and the requirement to deploy today from CONUS to overseas, we no longer have the big forces in Germany and in Korea as we had in the past. We need to move quickly. We need to understand where our material is. And so we need to work on the international standards so the visibility is there and we can do it, we hope, with the help of our business trading partners that move 95% of what we move. If anyone has any questions, I’ll be glad to meet with you afterwards – I know we’re running short on time and I’ve gone more than my five minutes. So, thank you very much.

Audience: [Applause]

Blum: Thank you. Good points. So if I’m mean, it was successful. Here, Rick is our final speaker.

Schuman: Not only do I stand between you and the breakout groups, I guess I stand between you and the break, so I guess you can decide which break is more important. Mike Walton, a little earlier introduced John Collins. John started the second month running ITS America and one of the things that he has instilled in us is that we are a technology based organization, by golly we should use technology. So not only do we have one state of the art projector system, we also have one twenty first century cosmetic mirror that’s going to help us use this one here instead of having to have the point someone else could use. [laughter] I want to accomplish two things real quickly, first is [you can sit on this – it’s pretty nice isn’t it – very England – the search committee didn’t know that, but I’m sure that a point in his favor] two things I want to accomplish, one is to give you a little background on things we call tags readers transponders interrogators, whatever you want to call them, give you a little flavor for where they are at in use today and the size of things we are talking about. And also a little about the process we are using right now to try to bring a little bit of order in that area.

You’ve heard the term DSRC thrown about a lot I’m sure about 160 of you – you’re in acronym overload right now and some of you may not know that DSRC stands for Dedicated Short Range Communications. Generally done by things of this size – ah, this is from my car, but can also be done by things about this size, which is also from my car, so I’m one of the few people in America that has multiple transponders in their vehicle – so I have a problem. These communications are characterized by short range, tens or hundreds of feet depending on how you set it up. Very high speed communications so we are not talking just going slow or standing still, we are talking about going as fast as cars can go. Very high bandwidth, that’s going to make up to the fact that if you are going very fast you have to read very fast to get any information of use. At extremely high reliability because some of the applications we are talking about deal with money. So therefore, it has to be even more reliable dealing with things that are moving. We are talking about for applications, general purpose applications, talking trucks, cars, toll collections, parking payments, information based applications, like probes and other sorts of things. Commercial vehicle applications, we’ll talk a little more about that in a moment, but those are both regulatory and potentially private applications and also transit emergency vehicles – we’ll see some utility for that as well. In terms of DSRC used for commercial vehicles, just one thing that I wanted to point out, an interesting thing that makes the commercial vehicles environment a little different than some of the other modes we are dealing with in the Freight systems, is that number one there are thousands and thousands of motor carriers from the one person that didn’t get out of the third grade to JB Hunts and UPS alike and we are trying to come up with some solutions that work for many of those carriers as possible.

It also operates on mixed use system. There aren’t a handful of carriers or lines that do this and they don’t operate, they don’t go to this port or that port, but they go all over the country and operate by paying tolls, buying gas , etc. etc. On the regulatory side, congress has dictated in the Bill that President Clinton will signed this evening, that they want to see a credential and safety screening system largely in place by October 2003. You can drive a truck though what that is supposed to mean, but the intent of congress is clear. They want to see some action over the next five years in terms of utilizing this technology. Some of the work that is being done to create the architecture, again this is the APL that doesn’t own and operate ships, that it has identified essentially three identifiers that if in place will be able to easily allow all of us to have unless vehicle number carrier number and trip numbers for boarder crossing and special trips in alike.

The market today, someone mentioned that we have four or five million transponders for toll collection growing rapidly. It’s the only ITS application that David Letterman has talked about that I know of, so it is by definition our most successful application in the ITS industry. There is also competing wireless point of sale transponders – this is a mobile speed pass, this is not nearly as rigorous from a communications stand point as this, but guess what, these are now becoming deployed almost as rapidly as these and can quickly take on a competitor, a less functional competitor but a competitor non the less. There are approaching one hundred thousand transponders for CVO applications – it is hard to get an exact number on that. What’s on the pipeline and what’s actually in use, what’s been bought, what’s on the shelf, and so forth. But to characterize the market, we got two different kinds of basic technologies, with multiple vendors supplying each. We have regional interoperability for some applications. We have limited interoperability between applications. I think that is a fair assessment of the market today. Some of these colors, I was trying to come up with colors that work, but the motion here is that for some applications the DSRC system has been very successful. But see the different color rings sort of various technologies that are in use today. They are not the same. They are not integrated. That is a major issue in this industry. The SRC standard – why do we need them? Well aside from making all that work and making everything work across the country, some people say "hey c’est la vie a lot of things don’t work together in life that’s the way it is" But the one thing that we found and number one is that some of these things interfere with one another. Two transponders made by the same manufacturer has been recently demonstrated one for toll collection and one for boarder crossing. If they are in the same windshield – you have problems. So there is an issue there. Multiple applications, right now there is not data management scheme to enable a transponder to be used for multiple applications other than by design for those specific applications or just by pure luck. It is also risky to assume that this interoperability order will come to this market by market forces. We also want open market multiple sources scale to products and like, motherhood.

So lets quickly jump to the process, how we’re trying to establish that and let me tell you this right off this by no means guarantees that we’re going to see interoperability occur other than Congress saying we’re going to have it for trucks, by golly. But we’re seeing some steps in the right direction. If you’d asked me two years ago, we were stuck. At least now I think we have a little momentum going towards the movement towards interoperability.

There are many components in the standards process. First off, there’s an honest broker – at least we think we’re honest. People beat us up all day long when we have meetings and then they tell us great job, keep at it. So apparently, we’re still somewhat considered a non-bias participant. We define requirements, we clearly define roles for standards developers, policy guidance throughout, and DOT support. Again in the honest broker role, we convened a bunch of folks numerous times and developed a vision. A vision. I don’t necessarily think that everyone in the community has bought this as a "this is where we’re going to go and, by golly, we’ll put our emphasis behind it." This is what we’re working towards. No one has said by golly this isn’t where we want to be. But we’re looking at by the middle of next decade seeing most vehicles having a transponder. Right now we are focused on North America, working the international issues as much as we can. But we’re looking at one transponder for multiple applications, regulatory and CVO being able to do a few more things.

In terms of defining requirements, users have defined needs. Again, not all users would buy this but a number of toll agencies got together and said we want these things to do this, and a number of CVO users have done the same thing. And that’s really been the basis for what has been after a few years of being stuck in the mud, a re-invigorated standards development process. And we’ve clearly defined the roles for various organizations. I can’t say that on the outside we have necessarily defined those roles, but the interface between the vehicle and the roadside we have clearly defined and we’ve sort of bird-dogged the other ones for if we can get that middle arrow between the vehicle and the roadside, the air interface worked out then we can start working these other issues for end-to-end interoperability.

A key to this reinvigorated effort has been executive level participation. Working with DOT, we’ve convened four executive level roundtables, various times and types, to keep the process moving. DOT has been there every step of the way. They’ve provided a lot of funding. Maggie mentioned Mike Schagrin a little earlier. Mike Schagrin, Mike Onder, Bill Jones, and a number of other folks within DOT have been essential in keeping this moving. They’ve essentially been equal partners with us in facilitating the process, although they have the money so you figure out who’s the equal partner. But they have largely left the content to the industry and the users, short of satisfying the requirements for CVISN and the like. They’ve really left it to everyone else. They just want to see it done. And as we move forward, how they move forward in policy making is going to be critical to whether or not we’re able to achieve the interoperability – the ultimate goal that we’re seeking.

Just to give you a quick update, I’ve two charts left, Maggie. Standards status – you all want to know where this is going and where we’re at with this. We’ve been talking about this since 1991, I believe. The air interface, that little squiggly line lightning bolt a few charts back, we’re using three standards to define that – the American Society of Testing and Materials is doing two of those. The physical layer is presently in ballot, and the data link layer will be in ballot shortly, we think with six weeks, two months, Ray? Fair enough. Ray says yes - that means it is. IEEE is developing, I was supposed to write application layer and message sets going to ballot, and that’s within days, we believe. Ramon Grijalva is here. His technical person is chairing that effort and has done a tremendous job creating an environment where multiple applications can work on a single transponder.

Just in conclusion, one of the reasons why we wanted to give this presentation was again to talk about similar problems, some people think it’s the same problem, I happen to believe that the fact that these things have to work going two-hundred miles an hour, you might not want to put that [pause], on the Autobahn 200 mph, but in America 120 mph, you might not want to put that same requirement on containers. But you have the same sets of issues. And if you decided in term of harmonization that you really want active standards development you need to consider a parallel approach we’re using in DSRC. It’s not pretty, it’s not easy, but its really reflecting reality.

We’re trying to place requirements above politics as best we can. But I do recognize that you have an international problem here. As Ed had mentioned this, clearly containers don’t stay in America as much as we’d like them to. It would make the problem a little easier, but it actually wouldn’t make commerce any better, so we want them to move. But it’s an international problem that might make it a little harder to solve but if it needs to be solved, it will be solved. But then another thing, what I’ve found with the experience with transponders is people are often trying to seek easy solutions. And I’ve found a quote that Einstein has – "everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler" – and I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind in the freight business. It’s an exceedingly complex business and we may not end up with solutions that have everyone doing the same thing, but we may end up with nested solutions and compatible solutions that collectively improve the operations of where we’re at. So, with that, Maggie I’ll turn it back to you. Thank you very much.

Blum: Excellent job. Remember we started late so we finished early. Except we have a little bit of time for some questions. I have one written question from up here. Mike will deal with it after – it has to do with timing of the breakout sessions. I’d like you to be able to address any of the panel members. I was impressed with them before and now after this day I’m doubly impressed. Here’s a chance.

Audience: [Silence]

Blum: Question? Everyone is ready for a break.

Walton: Let’s give this group a hand. They did a terrific job.

Audience: [Applause]

Walton: Speaking of hands, Rick are you going to give me one with this next go around as we introduce the breakout groups? You thought you were getting a break, didn’t you? Well you’re not. But I’ll be brief.

We tried to incorporate your desires, wherever possible, if you indicated one. We’d like for you to stay with the assigned group. The issue is that some of the rooms have a fixed capacity in terms of seating. So we’d like very much for you to go to the room in which you were assigned. The groups have been balanced to the extent possible in a variety of ways, so there is some rational behind the assignment process. Let me quickly then go through the breakout groups. As you recall the goals as they’re stated here. We’d like for you to go through the breakout groups and see if you can achieve each of these. Looking at the benefits for greater harmonization, articulate that, identify the candidate projects that will enable us to reach the desired benefits, draft an action agenda to achieve those benefits and then lastly help us identify any organizations that might be willing to take the lead or actively participate in the agenda initiatives.

The primary focus as you see is on the first three items. There will be five breakout groups as you now know. Three will be dealing with the requirements component, one each in the impediments and then the benefits. So, that gives us a total of five. There are some common outputs for each of the groups. Candidate projects for further harmonization, which was indicated before. An action agenda input, which you’re requested to identify and draft and then the identification of participants. This is perhaps the most important format, you’ll spend a lot of time working with this in the next period. This template lays out the objectives, and we’ll leave that up a moment. You can see that as each of the groups requirements, which again there will be three - one in benefits and one in impediments.

Each group is assigned in column A a unique task. So you’re requested to focus on that particular task. And I’ll come back to column A in a moment. Then going across, each group will identify and look for candidate projects which is column B. Proposed action agenda column C and then identify leaders column D. That is your charge. We’d like very much for you to complete that assignment. If you would like and if you have time you may tackle any of the others as well in column A. So you can address those if you choose but please focus first on your assignment, whether it’s requirements, benefits, impediments and complete across the format. Cell one for the requirements or cell A1 you’ll have information such as this. And each of the facilitators will be going through this in more detail. But that gives you some sort of the structure for A1. A2 in the benefits area you’ll be focusing on these items, potential beneficiaries and so forth. A3 in impediments, you’ll look at mitigation strategies.

Column B which all of you will be addressing. We’ll look at potential projects or efforts which will foster harmonization. And C, key elements of an action agenda. And then D, identification of key organizations, people who might contribute. So that’s the task. We do have facilitators and recorders in each of the five breakout groups. They’ve all been carefully selected and primed. They’re all superb. They can answer all questions, they see all wisdom without failure they’re superb. We have put together a straw proposal just to get the juices flowing as to what might go in particular areas. It is my no means intended to provide anything other then to prime the pump so to speak. So don’t feel that there’s anything to those proposals, but it was requested that there was a lot of time in effort had gone into looking at how this might work and suggesting some ideas and concepts in each of those cells. And this is nothing more than an idea of how to pull this together. There will be copies of this information in each of the breakout groups. Understand that we only have about twenty or so copies, others will be coming along as soon as we get those delivered to us. So, it’s intended to spur your thinking, there’s no hidden agenda. There will be support for the breakout groups this evening.

Your working time is until 6:00 and I’d like for you to consider using that. There is optional working time if you wish, but at 6:30 there’s a reception. So there’s one forcing function. At 7:30 is a dinner with a dinner and two keynote presentations that you see, that we’d like very much to participate in and by the way dinner is in rooms 1 and 2. And the breakout groups will reconvene tomorrow morning from 8:00 till 9:00, so you can finalize your proposals that will be presented in the Plenary session, the next morning from 9:00 till 10:30. The spokesperson from each of the breakout groups will make that report, so you have another hour in the morning. The continental breakfast will be served in your breakout room and I think the time for that is 7:15, I’m told. So continental breakfast at 7:15 in your breakout groups and you can begin as you wish. Anything else?

Oh yes. In your materials as well, there was some general ground rules. Speak in headlines, not essays. Focus on concrete statements. The parking lot’s a great idea and if for example you come across an interesting idea that’s not necessarily germane to your group but might be to another, write it down and send it over to them. But keep parking lot issues as you move forward and the rest I think is self explanatory. Is that it? You’re not going to put the list of whose responsible for this? You’d better.

This is very important and then I’ll get to the next list too. Leave that for a moment. These are your breakout leaders for impediments, Joe Sussman. Joe would you, there he is, stand up please. The facilitator for benefits, Nancy, she was just up here and she’s surrendered back there in the back. And Nora Ryan is here, somewhere, she’s way in the back as well. Hamlin, over there. And Carl, you all know Carl. So they’re the breakout and if you dearly love this process and after spending three hours and you’re really fired up, these are the people to congratulate, because they did a wonderful job pulling it together. That’s very quick, let me just also mention that General Kross, Commander of TRANSCOM, the U.S. Transportation Command is scheduled for lunch tomorrow and I wanted to point that out in case many of you might be interested. Any questions, comments? Any other logistics before we break? You’ve been a really great group. This is where it really hits the road, so to speak so good luck. Thank you.

Walton: Let’s go over the agenda for today. Our time frame is to go through the report outs and have discussions following each of them. As you know we had 5 breakout groups, one dealing with impediments, one with benefits and three with requirements. We will take them in the order in which they’re presented. We’ll go through those report outs; we’ll have some discussion. We’re looking for clustering opportunities and synergistic activities. Basically, we need to identify some opportunities for the action agenda by the end of today’s session. So today or this first session will be the report outs and discussion. We’ll take a break at 10:30 or so we’ll come back together and work through the action recommendations to come up with the action agenda that represents the priorities of this group. At lunch General Kross will be with us, as many of you know he is the Commander and Chief of U.S. TRANSCOM. Following that Mike Wolfe has the task of summarizing the breakout groups and activities, the action agenda, the priorities, the recommendations. Followed by that there will be a panel discussion led by Jon Helmick. Jon will go through with an outstanding panel and we’ll have a discussion about the challenges, opportunities, and areas that we need to focus on and so forth. And then we’ll conclude and hopefully we’ll conclude on schedule. And certainly I don’t think we’ll go beyond the 3:00 deadline.

Alright, without further ado why don’t we began then with the report out groups. I’ll introduce Joe Sussmsan who will do Group A – the Impediments. Joe.

Sussman: Mike, thank you and good morning. This is the report form the "A Team" as we came to be known. We will talk about impediments. Let me thank Bob Bouchard and Molly Markert who were very helpful in pulling together all the information that was developed. We had a very lively group with some very interesting perspectives. We’re compressing three- to four-hours of discussion into a ten minute presentation. We identified some over arching initial issues, which I’ll discuss. I’ll discuss the process by which we identified impediments. We prioritized those groups of impediments. I’ll discuss that as well. We came up with nine strategies and projects and then I have some summary comments as well.

Some of the initial issues which I think apply to all groups, not simply ours but we thought a useful frame of reference to think about as we go through these considerations of interoperability of intermodal freight systems. First of all a notion that this is a system and the systemic issues are quite key. Everything relates to everything else. As we identified impediments it was often very difficult to separate one from another. There was a lot of interconnection and we ought to understand that.

The triad of technology systems and institutions is a useful framework for thinking about this issue. There are technological issues. There are issues that operate in a systems level, and there are organizational or institutional issues in getting interoperability within intermodal freight systems. And it should come as no surprise to recognize that institutional issues are often the dominating ones, that we have technologies and system approaches that make sense getting organizations to cooperate and work together is often our most difficult task.

We consider the question of players. Who participates in this interoperability intermodal issue and in particular try to learn a bit of who is not here and thinking a little bit about why they’re not here. We noted the absence of Labor, organized or otherwise, the shipping community, our customers, and the airlines. They are not present in this workshop. There’s some information in that absence. The question of where the leadership should come from, the public sector, the private sector or combinations thereof. That’s a good question. We don’t really have a really good answer. Perhaps that will emerge from overall discussions. And finally, from the environmental perspective, we noted that everything we’re doing is being done in the context of dramatic technological change as cost benefit ratios for our technologies change virtually overnight. And, also in the context of dramatic growth and international traffic. So as we work towards solutions we must recognize the environment is one of dramatic change on both the technological and on a traffic dimension.

We worked on a process by which we generated impediments and impediments was our task as I noted before. Essentially we went around the room a couple of times with people identifying impediments responding to quick questions about what those impediments might be. We generated about thirty or forty particular impediments and then we worked into consolidating those into ten major categories of impediments as a more manageable set of issues that we could deal with. We then went through a prioritization of those impediments by voting. Each person got three votes on the honor system. You got to raise your hands three times as we went around and gave each impediment. Some people wanted more than three, but we held fast to that metric and we came up to a prioritized list and then finally we worked on developing mitigation strategies and projects.

The top ten came as no great surprise to us when we thought logically about what really were the impediments to achieving interoperability and intermodal freight. The actual issue of standards, the relationship of standards to existing systems and the development of architectures that include more than one mode was viewed as the most important impediment. The issue of cost, the cost of the technology, its cost effectiveness and the relationship of its cost to its benefits, and the fact that perhaps many are not convinced that those benefits indeed outweigh the costs, was viewed as an important impediment. The very diverse needs that exist in industry between various size companies and industries for example and the diverse needs that exist within government, with people being concerned with enforcement, with revenue collection, as well as safety and environmental concerns, are variety of issues that industry and government have to be concerned about, coupled with the substantial growth and trade as the environment within this is taking place.

Number four, was intellectual property and innovation linked to dramatic change in technology. As people develop technologies how will they insure their intellectual property is protected? Number 5 deals with labor acceptance of this technology. Several people told some horror stories about the destruction of equipment when labor perhaps did not see it in their interest to have this equipment deployed. Convincing labor of the advantages of technology in intermodal freight was viewed as important. The question of leadership; who takes on the leadership development of this whole complex system? The issue of how the public and private sector interact to create an overall systems approach was viewed as number six on our impediments list.

Number seven was the tension that exists between modal and intermodal perspectives. We have a tradition in which the modes quite understandably optimize their own operations and optimize their own architectures. The question of how one goes about overcoming those modal perspectives to produce an intermodal system is a great importance. We also noted in this context that the modes themselves are groping with extraordinary change. In the railroad industry for example we saw a remarkable consolidation over the last decade or so. Until those mergers shake out, expecting the rail industry to focus on intermodalism to the extent that people in this room might want to, a difficult thing to do.

Similarly in the trucking industry, deregulation is still playing out the extraordinary diversity of firms, ranging from one truck organization to the mega firms in the industry. The notion of internationalism as a key designed perimeter in our systems was view as vital. How one goes about creating a learning environment in which we in the United States can learn from our colleagues around the world, and vice versa, to make sense on an international scale, was identified. Regulation, and priority data in the hands of governmental officials is something that occasionally makes carriers very, very nervous. The question of this special case of how the public and private sector work together was identified.

Finally, education and human resource development was targeted. We have to go through a process in which people from the most senior to the most junior levels in the organizations, participating in interoperability within intermodal freight, are educated for the purpose of being able to advance the intermodal agenda. I emphasize here that these are mega categories we limited ourselves to ten. The fact that some of them have a modest number of votes doesn’t take away from their importance. There were several that fell off the end of the table. These, despite their relatively low vote totals are still viewed as important impediments to our purposes here today.

In the interest of time I’ll zip through the particular projects at warp speed, just to give you a sense of the kind of things that we were thinking about when we identified nine projects. The first deals with human resources development, the development of case studies that can educate people as to cost flows delays that exist in an intermodal system and the results of this case could be used to provide information to the community to advance our agenda. The second deals with automatic equipment identification. This is an ongoing project and therefore as an example of how different organizations can work together to perform projects that can help advance interoperability as a critical activity. The U.S. customs service, USDOT, and other organizations can participate in important test projects. The third deals with a port gate pre-clearance, integrating CVISN (Commercial Vehicle Information Systems and Networks) technologies with various other concepts, as an example of how organizations can work together to demonstrate whether interoperability is first doable, and second is cost effective.

The next deals with providing some leadership in the standards world. The notion of intermodal stakeholders participating in working groups both in North American and internationally, such as TC 104 and TC 204 committees, were identified. This workshop can be a source of leadership for these committees. To advance the ball we need to have to have folks like the people here today participating. The next deals with an industry research and development forum, using the model of what MARAD has done in its Cargo Handling Cooperative Program (CHCP), as a way of getting organizations together to consider various kinds of technologies and the cost benefits associated with them, getting input from a broad group of users.

The next deals with gaining some insights from extensive ongoing freight transportation movement activities, in particular CONOPS within the Department of Defense. Their concept of operations project provides a great learning opportunity. We felt the evaluation of the results from CONOPS should help assess the implications for private sector, shippers and carriers. The next deals with hazardous materials, both hazmat identification and emergency response. We need to look at cost benefits of these particular kinds of technologies, trying to understand what benefits truly exist. We need to consider this as a multimodal problem since hazardous materials move among modes. We had the sense that both the custom service and private carriers are willing to play harder ball in their own interests by forcing shippers to fully identify all commodities that are to be carried and then to document existing operational tests with their relationship to hazmat being highlighted.

Eighth, we have the end to end transportation chain, or the supply chain management kind of effort. I would characterize this as a research kind of an activity working on developing automated scheduling systems, using high technology concepts, such as artificial intelligence to pull together shippers and carriers into an integrated supply chain. This is an area of research at many universities around the country. And finally the team dealt with what we called an intermodal architecture. The term architecture has become a popular one within the transportation field. To a great extent it gets its popularity from the ITS program where a national architecture for ITS technologies has been developed. The notion was to think about expanding, extending that architecture to intermodal freight in such a way that it can take care of the wants and needs of individual carriers, across the modes, and across the world, eventually, to consider international issues.

In summary, we saw a need for a careful identification of requirements both from a public sector and private sector perspective. Second, we saw development of an intermodal architecture that focuses on freight oriented services. Many of us have been concerned that the current ITS architecture, for example, focuses much to heavily on passenger movements and not heavily enough on the freight side of the agenda. We need to consideration technologies, the development of standards on an international scale, the establishment of a set of demonstration projects that can document the costs and the benefits associated with interoperability and intermodal freight. And finally there is the notion of building on the momentum of this workshop, I would say that we’ve been able to develop substantial momentum judging from Group A with the excitement around the table relative to this problem. This could lead to hosting occasional workshops of senior officials and a variety of other follow on kinds of activity.

I would simply conclude by suggesting that the sense of the group was that institutional issues are really at the heart of what we’re doing here. Getting organizations to effectively work together may well be the optimal strategy. Working to that kind of a holy grail I think is our ultimate aim and I hope that this workshop is a step in that direction. Thank you!

Thank you very much and thank you in particular to the group who generated a whole bunch of good ideas in a relatively abbreviated time frame. Mike Walton says I can take a question or two at this point if anyone has any and I’ll look to some of my group members to help me in answering some of these. Yes, Mike?

Member: Is there any priority implied in your projects?

Sussman: The projects were relatively random in their generation. I think the way I would address that question is to lay those projects along side the priority associated with the impediments and those projects that address, for example, standards would be among the highest priority, and those that address architecture would also be of high priority, and so on down the chain.

Member: What about leaders? Have you identified any leaders?

Sussman: We talked a lot about organization and the extent to which the public and private sector ought to work together. We sensed there was at least a certain amount of Alfonse and Gaston on that dimension, with the public sector not being sure of jumping into leadership roles, and the private sector wondering about whether they could take on a leadership role. So I would say, Mike, we had more questions than answers on leadership. Thank You.

Walton: Thank You Joe. Good work Group A. Group B, Nancy – Benefits.

McLaughlin: Well, like the "A Team" we went with our slides and a lot of it is handwritten. We were the benefits team, and our task was to first to identify the benefits of harmonizing and then the projects that could foster harmonization, and then the action agenda, and the organizations of the people that would participate in these potential projects. So, on the benefits of harmonization, we spent a lot of time yesterday talking about the benefits. After thinking about it, we found that we were talking about were the benefits of ITS and not the benefits of harmonization. We realize that if we’re looking for the benefits of harmonization we are already conceding the fact that there are benefits to ITS. What we’re suggesting now is that we’re preaching to the choir. You know what the benefits of ITS are. So, the benefits of harmonization are the economies of scale and expanding use of ITS and ITS technologies. Obviously, eliminating the need for multiple tags and with that, multiple readers, lowers unit costs for the development, which would lead to more users, increased penetration of ITS, which would then further lower the costs. I mean the more we can develop these, the cheaper they become. So with increased penetration, we get the wider realization of ITS benefits. We consolidated our thinking into six or eight benefits such as 1) reducing congestion whether it be the highway, or the terminal; shorter cycle times which within the intermodal cycle could be the cycle times within a terminal again; 2) greater transportation reliability to the customer; 3) greater asset utilization to the shippers, carriers, or to the customer. Greater asset utilization could also pertain to the terminals themselves. 4) Better input to improve forecasting; We assume that with all this new information we can use it for better planning, and for better forecasting then we are able to do today from a manual process. And with that comes 5) better productivity and efficiencies with the assets of which could be people assets as well as the hard assets. And then, I assume last night Mike Wolf had an epiphany and came up with another benefit that we agreed with, 6) With harmonization we also accelerate innovation and reduce costs accordingly. So ITS is a catalyst. The adoption of ITS technologies leads to faster realization of the ITS and its benefits.

So, after much discussion, we came up with two projects. Unlike the "A Team" who was very prolific, we had two projects. The first project was what we’re calling a "super reader." Initially we were calling it "universal reader" but we’re afraid it would lead to some confusion that this team was going to develop the "be all" and "end all" of readers. What we’re saying is this would be the first step in readers that could do multiple operations and functions. So we drew a lovely picture, I might add, of an intermodal shipment life cycle. We have a steamship line starting from Europe all the way through the intermodal shipment life cycle in the United States. It obviously impacted steamship lines, the terminals, the truck carrier, the railroad, another truck carrier, and could affect break bulk as well. We identified all the different pieces of information that need to be passed and the actions that have to take place. However, picking this whole shipment life cycle to undertake is too vast. We broke off a piece of that and focused on it. What we were focusing on is the terminal and highway. So we said develop a reader that can read multiple tags and facilitate gate management, and to certain extent yard management, as well as regulatory requirements, certification of customs and tolls. Obviously the rational would be to lower the costs and broaden the base of ITS.

The beneficiaries could be within one terminal or it could be from terminal to terminal. If it were going from a port, usually the rail facilities are right there. There aren’t too many ports where you having to dray to the rail terminal. The focus could be within the port, or it could be a railroad terminal or a steamship terminal. The potential benefits are great. Obviously the truckers would be one of the main beneficiaries. The various regulatory agencies involved could be state or federal, with customs and tolls, and the like, and the weight information certification. The back end would also be the shippers. Perhaps the dray costs could be reduced. We can look at the costs of multiple readers verses the single reader. Although when we were discussing this, since there is not a single reader out there right now that can read all of these multiple tags, we could simulate a single reader by perhaps grouping readers together to read multiple tags so that we can at least start to see the turn time on these movements. The development of the single reader, if we went out first to develop the single reader for this project, would obviously delay the project itself. We would have to wait until we have a single reader and it could be an impediment. So, probably the largest measuring indicator would really be the turn time, whether that would be both terminal and truck. Then from that, we could perhaps identify what are the requirements for a single reader, which in itself would be a benefit. Then, look at the cost of multiple readers verses the single reader.

So who are the potential contributors? Obviously the mode operators, truck, railroad, steamship, terminal operators, ports, government, vendors and perhaps associations. The group we see leading this would be the ITS/JPO in USDOT.

To get this super reader to come together, we obviously have to come up with a working group. The working group should be assembled by September of `98, most likely in the Washington DC area, and they would really be a steering committee to identify the potential location for this project.

Our next project is an innovation assessment project. We’re looking for groups to come forward with projects for us to look at and see what the benefits, what the costs are, what it may take or perhaps even pending projects that may be of value to this team. This steering committee would review these projects and determine if we could, as we were saying earlier, look into what all took place and learn from their mistakes.

If we can conduct these projects, and see and learn from them, then there will be hopefully more interest in what we’re doing with ITS. The potential beneficiaries obviously are the whole intermodal community. The measure of the success of this would be obviously the adoption rate of successful technologies. We could learn from everyone else’s failures or successes. In the railroad community we’re doing that. When one railroad tries new technology in a terminal the other railroads come and look to see what they’ve done and then go home and try to do that. I think we all do this to a certain extent. This is just at a higher level with more visibility. Again the potential contributors are really the same ones as before, mode operators, ports, associations, the government, potentially vendors as well, and we figured, yeah, we would give it to the ITS JPO again. We also threw in a couple of others; the Office of Intermodalism and the TRB. And I think that’s it. We were really optimistic that by September of 1998 we could once again put the group together who would decide on these projects. Most likely that panel would convene in the DC area. That was the results of Group B and the benefits.

McLaughlin: If you have any questions, I’ll be glad to answer. Okay, well thank you very much.

Walton: Next we get into the breakout groups that we’re dealing with requirements, we’ll take them in order. Carl Seiberlich, Nora Ryan, and Bill Hamlin. Carl.

Seiberlich: Good morning. The task requirements for the projects are building blocks to achieve harmonization while being affordable. The application and technology goes to the bottom line of the customer. For successful reporting, the customer has to have confidence in the carrier that he will always provide the highest percentage of any changes with the on time delivery. Some customers have much higher requirements for location reporting. One of those deals with the military, where changes in the military situation may require diversion of the cargo to some other area. When you look at a system and try to reduce cost and improve transit time through efficiencies you build in capabilities to meet surges or changes. Macy’s could have empty shelves for a couple of days and survive. But on the military side many lives might be lost if there were not the capability to meet a surge requirement. The additional capacity costs money. There is a trade off as far as the requirements of the customer.

Candidate projects, equipment identification standards, analysis, and we really are piggy backing here on an ITS project. The key word here, which has been mentioned before, is interoperability of identification tags. The rational is that it’s a fundamental building block for improving the intermodal information exchange. Our group felt very strongly that part of the problem right now when you look at all of the various modal, regulatory, players is the information exchange problem. There are a number of projects going forward right now, such as ITDS, that need to be brought together to make it all play properly.

A stakeholders steering group is very important. I think you can see we’re really looking at the policy options to meet the requirements. The most important of those adopted is the stakeholders steering group. I might mention here we feel that out of the stakeholders steering group will come the leadership on these projects. One of the questions is, of course, on the truck tractors. How should they be included in a system that is looking at control of assets and the tracking of cargo for the customer.

The second project recommended, on EDI, is really part of the information sharing among the various diverse intermodal players. To facilitate information sharing and reduce the costs of shipment, tracking and supply chain management is essential. Both on the military and the commercial side that word supply chain management is extremely important so that when the items gets into motion it stays part of the system. Again we’re recommending a small scale test. Picking the right stakeholders for the project is extremely important.

On equipment security tags, our team believes that security issues, particular in large yards, is ripe for new technology. Many terminals because of economic reasons have had to reduce their security forces and the number of people available at night has been sharply reduced. What sort of tag do you need or system do you need to protect break-in of the boxes in the yard? Secondly, if the box is in route, what sort of tag do you need? We had a long discussion on the viability of security in route. I know customs has interest in whether a box is cleared at seaport and then comes to a border crossing point, has been tampered with in route. Our team also felt that there are added requirements for tags, such as monitoring temperature at break-in, and whether or not smarter tags are needed, which may drive up the cost. The question also to be addressed is if somebody breaks into the box do you want to know which cargo they tampered with inside the box. Although the MPO's and state transportation departments have been very interested in the technology trend of the business, they look at highways as a means to get people to work. Freight has not been addressed at the MPO level until the last several years. We feel that there should be an effort to try to bring the states and their relationships particularly in the MPO’s together in various local areas to share best practices. DOD obviously has to be involved as well. This is an important project to try to bring the working of the intermodal system into a multi-state decision making process. Are there any questions on our recommendations? Thank you.

Member: Carl, a couple of questions. On the equipment security tags, you mentioned customs. Was that to include, or could it include the customs?

Seiberlich: It could include customs and would need to differentiate between in route security and terminal security.

Member: And also, on the other two or any of the activities, did you identify specific lead or convenor? You mentioned stakeholder groups and so forth but did you target any particular lead for the other projects?

Seiberlich: No, we were unable to do that.

Ryan: Hi, I'm Nora Ryan and I'm the group leader in Group D which is the second group in requirement. One of the things that we did in the workshop was to review the objective of the workshop; to specify the needs for freight movement, identification applications, to identify the differences and commonalties between the various communities and stakeholders involved in the transportation network, and to come up with recommended actions or projects to build on, investigate, or enhance these commonalties.

We got into a discussion early on about what kind of a bottom line goals were for improving interoperability harmonization, etc. Really what we're looking for is a seamless flow in tracking of cargo, data and equipment. We wanted to make sure that any of the requirements we came up with really answered a problem that was out there. We didn't want to come up with a solution and there was really nothing to solve. And then also, as Carl mentioned, these requirements or improvements projects we come up with have to have a bottom line benefit to the organization. If there is no bottom line, then perhaps they shouldn't be undertaken. We talked a lot about what was meant by requirements. We kind of came up with that requirements are in the eye of the beholder and there are a lot of different viewpoints on this issue. There are questions of commercial versus military requirements. Also, if you’re looking at domestic versus international anytime that your going to bring in customs or the border crossing issues that adds a new level of complexity. There are questions about to what level do we need the information? There were individuals in the group who only need items at the container level and aren't really concerned with what's inside the box. Then there were individuals who were very concerned with what was inside the box and didn't really care about the box itself. So we came down to the fact that requirements are going to be very broad and they're based on the benefits perceived by each stakeholder. The purposes of the information that each stakeholder wants were varied and we came up with five.

One is for customer service. So that customer "xyz" can find out where their boxes, where their shipment is, where their equipment is. Customer is not limited to the end user. Each person in the transportation chain is a customer at one point or another. Improved productivity, whether it be within a terminal or between terminals, if it's truck turn times at gates or equipment utilization, cargo security was listed as an important reason for the exchange and accuracy of information.

There were questions on asset management and then also government requirements . We had various concerns about the data acquisition itself prior to talking about exchanging it. There were questions about the method by which the data is entered into an electronic system in the first place, whether it be RFID, optical character recognition, satellite systems, or manual entry concerns, about knowing how the information was put in as it affects accuracy and reliability. Accuracy, you want to be aware of the error rate and you also want to know how you're able to identify errors and correct them and what the process for that would be. We had questions about timeliness – what actually is timely and also what is affordable timeliness? And then we talked about the level of detail of the data that came in and it boiled down to a couple statements which said I need to know all the data relative with my process but I don't want to be burdened with any of the data that's relevant to anybody else’s process.

On process point, when is data read in or when is there notification? And we talked about exchange points, as far as responsibilities of the cargo. And then also, change of status points, and one example is the point where a container, for example, is lifted onto a rail car or onto a ship. That's a change of status that is very important to certain parts in the logistics chain. Then we got into series of discussions about the attributes for the information, it needs to be accurate or there needs to be at least some recognition of the level of accuracy based on the method by which it was entered into the system. It needs to be acceptable, which came up over again and again, that in most situations, the data is in an electronic system somewhere. It's just a method of knowing where it is and being able to access it when it's needed.

The next two bullets kind of go together, we said we need the data to be comprehensive or complete. I want every piece of data that I could possibly use for my system. But, we also want it to be selective. If we're only interested in the container, we don't want to know all the information about the shipment or all of the probable customs regulations. There's only certain items of data that each individual organization is going to be interested in. So we came up with the concept that there's really going to need to be a filter or if you want to call it a translator, that for example, when a container enters in through a gate it may read in through a tag or through optical character recognition, that container "xyz" has reached this terminal. That means something to the terminal operator. That information then could be translated or filtered into an alternate form that would go to different stakeholders down the chain that would in effect say cargo "xyz" which is hubcaps is now on route and provide a more customer specific message.

We did talk about standards, and that there would need to be standards for the information. They need to be shared standards and they need to try to be compatible. The information needs to be secure, needs to be verifiable. We did talk about time sensitivity. Time sensitivity is going to probably vary based on the customer, so there needs to be methods for allowing different levels of time sensitivity requirements. The data needs to be event based to indicate where there are changes in status of the cargo or changes in responsibility of the responsible parties. Customer oriented, as I said before. If I'm GM, I probably don't want to have some cryptic message that said container "xyz" passed through this gate. I'd like to have something more oriented towards what I'm interested in saying that parts "abc" are now three days away from destination. Needs to be cost effective, bottom line again. And then two important things we added this morning are that there really needs to be an event trail. So that if you need to go back and look at the details of how something is processed you can go back and see a history of the transit.

Also, when we were talking about this information, we talked about having all this data and you kind of get the idea that there would be this big data warehouse somewhere where people would just be working all day to maintain this database. That's not what we're trying to talk about. What we're envisioning is a distributed system, whereby data is not stored in one central point but it's a matter of having the correct links and access authorization to those links, so that people can get the information from the organizations who have it.

Now we're going to got into some projects that we identified. We did call it a universal reader instead of the super reader. But this was identified that there are multiple tags out there. If we're not going to come to a standard on tags, which I think we agree probably is not going to happen, that there needs to be some effort made towards a universal reader.

A second project that was identified and this obviously has been looked at in isolated cases before but is the investigation of the tagging all the containers which people kind of come back to and say let's tag all the containers. What if we tag all the containers? And really there's questions about the feasibility of that. Let's look at the feasibility of that? Let's look at the methodology? How would you even approach that situation? And then really, what is the cost benefit of that and the return on investment? And when we wrote down, which was very important to the group this morning, the bottom line is who would pay for that? And you might say well, if you do the cost benefit analysis and the return on investment, it should just fall out who should pay.

But the people who get the benefits aren't always the people who pay. So that's an important issue. And then, the second bullet was just listing that – there are organizations that have looked into this. Some have attempted to do it – APL, MATSON, and several of the tag vendors have done studies on it. On all of these projects, we emphasize, that we shouldn't start from scratch. There's a lot of parallel efforts going out there, and what we need to try to do is build on those.

Another identified project and it goes on along with Bob Clark’s presentation yesterday, was looking at the effectiveness of tagging chassis, as opposed to tagging all of the containers. Another project that was identified concerned the acquisition of the data, and suggested to look at optical character recognition and to assess it. What was specifically envisioned was a prototype test in which you would use both OCR and a radio frequency tag to compare the accuracy and reliability of the data that was received. And there are existing places where OCR is being used, places like MAHER terminals, Union Pacific, and then there are also, I gather, some prototype projects in Europe. It was also suggested and I think it is probably true for all these projects that a cost benefit analysis needs to be done on any of these to determine whether the increase in accuracy is basically worth it.

Then we also did talk about seals and coming up with a RF readable seal prototype. Some examples of the things that we felt we might want a seal to do, in addition to having it's seal I.D. to indicate whether it had been broken or not broken, was to look at temperature. There are various other things that you could look at, such as volumetrics and electronic monitoring of the status of the container. There are current projects going on in Europe, as well as security project in the port of Miami. The port of Miami project also involves GPS. So, that's another example of what the seal can do.

The last two projects that we identified are more research projects, and have to do with the exchange of information from one data source to another. We should look at the ITS systems architecture program, which identified data sets for various modes of transportation and to view the existing work that was performed. Apparently, intermodal was not listed as a specific data set. Perhaps those data sets could be reviewed and intermodal could be added as its own unique data set, or the data set could be modified to take into account the intermodal issues.

Finally, what we have been talking about, is how do you share all of this data in a secure distributed environment. One suggestion was to look at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) advanced logistics program, and what they are doing to create a DoD logistics data network. The suggestion is to look at lessons learned, the architecture they’re looking at, and to take what works and try to create, through a public/private joint program, a prototype parallel commercial logistics data network application. And I should mention that Sandia National Labs had a very similar project that looked at a distributed secure data exchange network. John Wagner is here from Sandia National Labs. I'm sure he'd be happy to talk to anybody about that. So those were the projects that we identified. That's my presentation. I would like to thank Harry Caldwell who was the recorder for his efforts in writing down everybody’s input. I would also like to thank everybody that was in my breakout group. My worst fear was that I would be in a room with 25 people who didn't want to say anything and that was very obviously not the case. So I want to thank each of them for their participation, their candor, and their patience. Thank you.

Walton: Any questions or comments for Group D?

Member: In the seven projects, I think you identified, if I counted them correctly. Did you go so far as to identify any leads or next step?

Ryan: No, unfortunately we were running a little low on time. There was obviously issues of who would pay for the research. I would think that most of those would be a public/private kind of joint effort. We did not identify a convenor.

Hamlin: Good morning, it looks like I get to bat cleanup here, so I will try to get us out on time. We were the third group to also deal with requirements, I think we had a spirited group, I think a lot of what your going to see piggy backs and really reiterates what you've seen in the first four readouts. A lot of this does dovetail with each other. I'll do my best to try to capture the essence of what our group talked about.

First of all, we followed pretty much the same format as everybody else, and we got into the requirements around three elements. They are: the asset itself, the contents of the asset and then sort of general information. We started with some simple things and we kind of grew to 22 different requirements. There were some concerns about whether or not we are going too far. Is this getting too complicated? I think the other groups have talked about that too. But we started out with asking where is the asset and what are the contents of the asset?

We get into separately some information on the condition of the asset itself, from a maintenance perspective, possibly from an overall status of the asset. When you look at a very high cost movement of pharmaceuticals out of Puerto Rico, certain refrigerated cargo, other high valued cargo, you want to have a little idea of the content information, the status of the asset. Am I empty? Am I full? Am I heavy? Am I loaded? Some of those kind of things.

We talked about the security of the asset and intrusion devices on high valued goods and sensitive military goods. You would want to know if there were some sort of tampering. The hazmat information, information of what's in there and then possibly first response type information.

We did talk about on demand information, reporting vs. scheduled reporting. From the asset perspective, you may just want to know where it is certain times of day. When you get more detailed, you want to go in and query the asset. The asset specifications might help in terms of manufacture or owner, tare weight, last inspection, maintenance records, things like that. A lot of talk was had around the accuracy and the completeness of front end information.

There was a concern that when we have this information stream that we don't add to it along the way, that people who need information can get it. The integrity of the information from the beginning needs to be maintained, so that we don't go in and make a lot of changes. There was some talk about being able to get front end information from vessels and train manifests to be able to allow the dray operator to be more efficient. As the APL speaker said yesterday, we need to get the right equipment in the right place. On DSRC or AEI read capabilities, we had a lot of discussion around the problem of battery life and how much data is moving, and what's realistic on a battery. And if you have an asset sitting in a dessert in Saudi Arabia or in China or in a former Soviet Union or even somewhere in the United States, it might tell you thirty days out to change batteries. If the battery dies, the asset and cargo fall off the radar screen. So could you have a device that you could go in and possibly scan without power and be able to retrieve certain information? Sort of. You should have the ability to recharge the battery on the conveyance, possibly a triple charge once you get onto a train or onto a truck where you can keep those batteries moving. Again, it should not interfere with any other existing systems.

We also talked about a sensitivity to hazmat. This was an interesting one that I hadn't considered, such as setting off explosives. You don't think about that the first time you go through this. But you really have to be sure that the frequencies your operating on don't tamper with something else. It does need to be inoperable with the existing systems, we don't want everyone to have to scrap all the systems they have to be able to use a harmonized system. We need a wide coverage and what we talked about here is international RF frequency process. There are some different frequency laws and issues that as we look at this globally we need to be sensitive to.

Certainly information security, when you look at proprietary information, military information, you have to be very cautious. The physical characteristics of the tag. How big is it? Where can you put it on a device? What kind of antenna do you need? In a port or rail or terminal, operations are very tough on equipment and can be very tough on the DSRC/AEI device. Not to mention what labor might want to do to the device.

Export control. We need to be sensitive to exporting of information and exporting of the technology. A multi threaded system, multiple access, multiple users, we don't want to wait on the ability to get data and probably what led us into our Sea-Land project is that all this needs to be affordable. That's the bottom line. What will a potential customer pay? What can we afford internally?

Our candidate project was sort of an over arching project that we talked about and then there's three elements that I'll get into but it was really a cross industry benefit analysis. I think that in every previous readout I heard something about cost benefits. Bottom line, can we afford it? What does it give us? And what we talked about was to assemble a group of cross industry representatives that will identify information to be shared across modes that does not delay the shipment. And in parenthesis this morning we talked about agreement on the minimum data standards.

Number one, what can we afford? What do we really need on a minimum basis? And secondly, how do we access that data? Some of the discussions we heard yesterday about do you have a central data storage facility that you can tie back with an identifier, and pull that information. How much data needs to reside with the asset and with the tag. Secondly, determine if it is cost justified to install a device on fixed assets in an effort to improve utilization of information valued to customers that could generate additional revenue or efficiency improvement. Again, customers are coming out and saying that they want a lot of things. Our industries are not sure they're willing to pay for it. And we really need to flush this out early on in the process. So the rationale is that the industry segments have worked independently, but not collectively to identify the end to end information process and the costs and benefits associated with implementation to be able to move forward. We need active participation and buy in from major industry segments, also from vendors, union, and customers; and this includes military and government segments. I think often we leave customers and organized labor out of these discussions. And both of them I think are very important as we move forward.

What we thought we'd start with is to establish a core group, and then segment groups and resource groups as an overall structure with potentially a geographic focus and that geographic focus could be North America versus Europe versus Asia versus South America. Or it could be more specific and you could take a Northeast region, or a corridor. But we really wanted to get it down to something that was manageable. We would draft a letter from the core group to a specific industry segment asking what has been done from an information technology perspective? What has been the value to your organization? And also ask for any process analysis that has already been done around the information requirements. We would ask for participation by one or more company representatives of that segment to participate in several focused meetings to develop specific actions for a cross industry pilot. And we would determine what committees or organizations their companies already participate in, dealing with this issue. We started our session by listing everything that was already active. And there was a pretty large list. There's a lot of committees and a lot of things that are going on but we don't think that it has been pulled together.

The core group would then establish segment teams, i.e., in the steamship area, terminal operators, railroads, leasing companies, customers, vendors and those specific segment teams then would, if they haven't already, map their processes, conduct a needs analysis, identify the benefits of their segment, and then participate in determining a pilot program that would involve cross industry participants. One of the comments that came out this morning is, we tend to be very focused on our own segment and maybe don't take broader benefits that may come across multiple segments, or even areas that we haven't considered in a very general way.

The core group, with the information from the segment groups, would develop a white paper that would identify the overall cost benefit by industry segment, with a bias for action around the pilot project, combining existing projects that are already out there to a specific asset base, be that containers or chassis or rail cars or truck cabs, whatever shows the best benefit. We recommend that the core group meet within 30 days. The white paper, realistically must be finalized prior to or by the end of the year to meet most companies capital planning requirements. I know with our company, Sea-Land, if we don't get something in the capital pipeline for the prior year, it's very difficult to get capital money in the middle of the year, if it hasn't been planned on. We also want to look at other entities for possible support.

On the leaders, again using a cross industry concept, I was roped into pulling the lead on this which I'm happy to do because I think a steamship line with a large asset fleet will have a big stake in this. Matt Shore from EagleEye Technologies said he would be involved. James Sharp from NIER and someone from the Union Pacific. Mr. Finn was not sure whether it would be him or somebody else, but this is at least four people that jumped up to volunteer. I've had others come up afterwards and say "look, I'll get you a name, or I may be willing to participate," so it looks like we got some energy around some people coming together on this. We do need to include organized labor and other potential beneficiaries and or blockers. We need to really think about who could throw a wrench into this? Who are the blockers? How do we identify them? How do we get to them? How do we make them part of the action and part of the solution? And we need to look at this globally.

So in summary, overall the requirements identified for the most part were not new. It's a regurgitation of things that this group and others have looked at over the last probably five years. The individual segments of the industry are doing their own thing and the analysis within their own requirements. No one has actively introduced the customer to determine what they really want and what they'll pay for. Many organizations and committees have done pre-work on this problem, but it hasn't been brought together and really analyzed in a robust cost manner. Cost benefit analysis must be done to justify the capital required to do a large project or ultimately a major asset application. And that's what our team had. Thank you.

Walton: Surely, that ought to generate some questions and comments. Anyone? Volunteers, you know who to see. Any other comments at this time?

Well, first of all, there are a couple of things. First, I don't know whether we captured all that we need to in the foils at this point. Let us have the transparencies at the end of this session to do some consolidation. Let me say right at the outset, that was a terrific job by all the groups and I certainly think we owe the facilitators as well as the recorders a great round of applause.

Audience: [Applause]

Walton: And of course thanks to all of you for your hard work and your perseverance to a long day yesterday, and we're not over. We have identified by my counts some 22 or so potential projects at various stages of evolution at this particular point. We're going to take a break. We're going to reconvene at 11:00. We're going to further discuss these 22 and other possibilities, some combinations and so forth. We would like I think to establish a priority. We would like also to generate any refinements to any, any additions or changes. It will help, I think, in Mike's effort later on to pull together a summary view for consideration by the panel which convenes after lunch and after General Kross' luncheon presentation. Any questions or comments, before we take a 30 minute break? I think we would like to have the steering committee members up front, so we can talk about this. What we just heard. Again, well done. And we'll reconvene at 11:00 please.

Walton: What we would like to do at this particular step is to get some sense of you're interests.

From your participation over the last day and a half, I would like to ask if you can help us come together with some sense of direction. There will be some follow-on efforts, that we'll discuss with you after lunch. The next step is for Mike Wolfe in our working group to try and advance the straw ballot process and the priority project process to the next step in the agenda setting. There are obviously some clear priorities that will be easy for us to me toward.

We tried to organize the responses into the five areas. There were a number of particular topics that have been summarized. We’re not certain that they’re in the right category. Each of the groups may have their own perspective. But these are the ones that we have tried to put together. The super reader is obviously the one from Groups B&D. Cost benefit case studies from Group A, the impediments group. Groups C and D had the readable security tags and the requirements area of the chassis tag and so forth. So within these groups would anyone like to offer any further discussion, clarification? I realize you have only seen and heard the wants. What we would like to do is get the sense of your interest and priority among those particular items. We will give you three votes and we’d like to do a straw ballot. That’s the process that I’d like to use for this particular one. But before we do that, anyone have a question or want elaboration on any of the ones that are listed up there?

Member: Paul Manuel, Mark IV. If we could go back to two slides backwards. We were talking about the super reader. I work for Mark IV – we’re a manufacturer of that type of device. And obviously, that’s one category of the devices we use as identification of vehicles and freight and so forth. And I just wanted to point out, that there is a tremendous effort underway hosted by ITS America and some of the standards organizations that are working on that type of subject. What I would recommend as a project is to provide inputs to those working groups under requirements that are unique to the DSRC/AEI application, freight identification.

Walton: Okay, thank you Paul. I think that in all of these cases, we will take the straw voting process that we would like to have and we will flush out more related to each of these. As we indicated before, you’ll be getting within a short period of time a report out of all of these and ultimately by the end of July we think, a report that will began pulling more of this information together. Where there are obvious activities going on that have a bearing on this particular area we will try to bring together. Any further discussion on this one? If not, let’s go to the next one.

The intermodal architecture perhaps can be considered as one that encompasses all the three previous slides if you will. There were two recommendations that came out. Two projects were identified and those are cited here. You know, obviously there are a lot of activities associated with it and then the last one, we had intermodal forum and think of it more as a programmatic frame for all of the previous slides, if you will. So this would be the overarching notion, the first one and so forth. So again we tried to capture most all of the ones that had been identified.

Okay, what we’ve done is place a statement of your priority in each particular area. I think that when we come back after lunch that we’ll have the opportunity perhaps to look at the priorities among these particular areas. And, there’s the likelihood for following the discussion that we’ll have more guidance and more opportunity to shape the agenda a little bit more. It was clear that some of those are clear winners for which there are targeted groups. If there’s not a champion that’s been identified to watch the effort, there are others where the lead or the catalyst was sort of left up generically to either the ITS Joint Program Office, within FHWA, or somewhere of that nature. But I think the step is to go and flush these out more to give you the opportunity, when you receive the evaluation form, and these will be restated again, and give you the opportunity to pick the ones that you would like to be involved in. Clearly, I don’t want to bias your response to that survey, but you’ll continue to be requested, when you get the information, to give us feedback to which ones are most important for you. Also let me know which ones you would like to be personally involved in and we’ll continue to move this effort forward.

There’s a number of excellent projects in here. Within two to three weeks you’ll receive information as to all of the breakout reports. You will also receive, of course, an evaluation form, and information about a web site address, which is to be cross-linked with various agencies. That web site at this particular time is envisioned to be within ITS America, but you’ll be given a specific address. We also think we will be able to provide you information that goes up on the web site automatically through your e-mail address. The web site, though, enables you to interact and to communicate and to participate as the products from this activity move forward. So that’s one piece of information that you’ll be getting in two to three weeks. Look for that. And as I mentioned before, in there will be a form in which you can identify your priorities for staying involved in this process.

The second part of it is at by the late July you should receive proceedings along with an executive summary and a further statement of the actions as it unfolded here and as they've been further developed. That's a very ambitious schedule but it seems doable. In addition to that, there will be the ITS Intermodal Newsletter, which you had a copy of in your registration packet when you picked your material up. There will be information contained within that document on a regular basis that pertains to this activity as well as others that are going on within the intermodal arena. So that is envisioned to be some of the immediate products. In addition to that we have a charge from Bill, that within 30 days a group is to convene. That's a superb activity for which there's a designated lead and some structured core group and other related activities. Some of these others are going to take a little bit of work. We just can't throw everything at FHWA ITS/JPO, they tell me that they have other duties and responsibilities although I don't think that's really the case. I think Mike's got plenty of time to call us about these activities. Just kidding, there will be some opportunities for you to get more involved and to participate in the leadership of some of these initiatives. Those who wish to promote and move forward on some of the high priority projects, are going to have to get more involved. We just can't let or expect that a government agency will take the lead. Now they can do the facilitation, ITS America staff has indicated that they will also participate in the facilitation.

So that's at least where we're headed, we've got much more to do, but I wanted to give you the sense now since the afternoon is jammed packed. We're racing toward the finish line, some idea of what the reward is at the end of the finish line when you get there. We do have General Kross who will be with us at lunch. We certainly want to be seated and at attention by the time the General arrives. Any further discussion?

Seiberlich: I have the great privilege today to introduce General Walter Kross, U.S. Air Force, who is the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Transportation Command and also the Commander of the Air Mobility Command for the United States Air Force. General, on behalf of everyone here we would like to tell you how much we appreciate your participation. I could give an extremely long introduction to the General but I'm certainly not going to do that. He’s had a long distinguished career in the United States Air Force. He flew 157 combat missions in Vietnam, in the F4’s. Before coming to his current job, he was Director of the Joint Staff in Washington and he had a distinguished tour with the U.S. Transportation Command and with the Air Mobility Command. I know many in this room have worked with him. When I think of General Kross, I think of leadership, I think of vision, and I think of partnering. And one of the great things that I've noticed that many four star officers fail in projects when they don't roll up their sleeves and get right in there. And many of the committees that I've been involved with, General Kross has been an active participant and certainly inspired all of us to get in there and help him get the job done. General we're delighted to have you with us. Thank you.

Kross: Thank you Carl. It's a pleasure to be with great partners and great teammates. When I think of the things that we're all trying to achieve in this particular conference the talent that's within this room can pull together and really get an awful lot done and take us to the next level in this very, very important area where we need to go. There are few rooms that have this kind of corporate and government team work focus on an issue that's this important for our country not only in terms of our national defense, which I'll talk a lot about today, but also for how the United States shapes the world – corporately and morally. That covers the first couple of pages, so I'm kind of flipping that over.

I want to tell you a little bit about this mysterious thing called the U.S. Transportation Command and the kinds of things that we're doing in terms of AIT and fusion and how important it is that we do it all in an integrated way with you. U.S. TRANSCOM has been an active partner in DOD's prototyping of AIT and the AIT CONOPS. And today I want to talk to you about the four AIT prototype scenarios. I know that Ed Coyle of the Defense Logistics Agency has mentioned them to you.

But first, let's talk a little bit about TRANSCOM. They’re one of nine unified commands. Five of these unified commands are responsible for geographic areas and are often called the geographic CINCS. The remaining four are global in their responsibilities and TRANSCOM is in that global group as you might imagine. Our mission seems very straight forward. To provide air, sea and land transportation for DOD and other customers beyond DOD both in times of peace, times of war, and that big gray area in between. To accomplish our mission we have three component commands, some of you may know that we have the air mobility command which is our air component, the military traffic management command which is our surface component, and the military sealift command, which is our sea component.

We're a total force of 163,000 active, guard, reserve and civilian personnel, plus our commercial partners. And you could divide our work into 30/30/40. Thirty percent active duty, thirty percent guard and reserve and forty percent drawing from the corporate transportation partners that we work with in peace and war. So all of us are indeed readiness partners. We're a very operational command, not standing by to enter the action. We're like many transportation businesses, we're 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and totally global. And we operate in a few more modes than the average transportation business operates in. Most operate in one, maybe two most. We operate in nine modes. In addition to air land and sea cargo those three modes, we also move passengers, about a million passengers a year. That's a mode. We also move medical patients, that's a mode. We do air drop, nobody else does air drop, that's a mode. We do air refueling around the globe with our six hundred air refueling tankers, KC 10's, KC 135's, that's a mode. And we also move Air Force One and a lot of VIP passengers, and believe me that's really a mode. But, what's that ninth mode? The ninth mode is transportation information. It's a mission and a process, unique unto itself. It's rapidly becoming TRANSCOM’s dominant mission.

TRANSCOM is the DOD executive agent for providing intransit visibility (ITV). Many of you know about the global transportation network. And when you have ITV you have a lot of things, but it all starts with timely and accurate information. When you have it, you have preeminent command and control information, and you have analysis information, and you have smart business decision information. And you have agility to support the customer the way the customer needs to be supported. So it's very, very important that we get this stuff right. We carry everything from express packages to tanks, we even go to Antarctica over three hundred missions last year for the national science foundation. We're 7.2 billion dollar a year transportation organization, average size by your standards. About 3 million of that is out sourced to our commercial partners in peace so that they will be there when we need them in contingency and war. Who are those partners? The cutting edge of transportation corporations in America today and you know all their names.

Please note however, that we are in information organization first and foremost. Without that we're just a mediocre transportation organization. And we're trying to move beyond mediocrity and get a whole heck of a lot better. Above all else, we're an operations organization. Whether that's in combat or Persian Gulf or humanitarian relief in Africa. We're deploying our cargo often the first to move in and then we sustain them when their there. We fight shoulder to shoulder with them, whether the fights humanitarian or a real hot war. And when our customers succeed we bring them home, and our role up of our support sources is often the last plane out or the last ship out on the type.

When TRANSCOM was created about ten years ago the original concept was to plan for and take over the defense transportation system in war time. But we learned during the Gulf War how difficult that is to do that, from a standing start without having to operate in peace time. So today our charters are totally inclusive. We operate the defense transportation system both in peace and war. Today there is almost never a clearly defined line between peace and war. It's more of a gray zone and we visit that gray zone both in time and in place. Almost every day, in some respect. We are most happy when we don't visit it at all, but we never know when we will. We provide mobility support to the military services, the Department of Defense agencies to other government agencies like the CIA, Treasury, Department of State, the foreign governments. It's very common for us to move to Belgium, to France, and also non-government agencies, like doctors without borders, etc. When there is a need, the world community looks to the United States. When you have to move something, the United States looks to U.S. TRANSCOM.

That, in a nutshell, is who we are and why we exist. You can probably see the link between our commands high opts tempo and our eagerness to participate in any AIT prototype at all. While it is extremely important for us to get people in cargo from here to there, it is also vital for us as an information organization to supply our customers with who, what, and where, even how on the movements. And they set the bar very, very high and they are setting the bar higher every day.

Like others in the logistics business, U.S. TRANSCOM looks to the prototypes findings to help form a basis for AIT implementation. We must continuously improve; improve the response time, the cycle time, the support to the war fighters and our other customers. And to decrease the time and to decrease the costs to get new capabilities fielded. That's very important too. And we'll need to perform a very early operational assessment of the system in the real world before we invest a lot of money in it. We're operating in an era of doing more with less. More with less, no apologies, if you don't like it, then you're not going to like TRANSCOM. You won't like North American either and you'll move to Russia. And when you get there you're going to find that you're not going to like Russia either. Cause their changing too. More with less.

The real issue should be not how to do more with less, it is not simply developing the best technology or even building the best equipment. The real issue is getting the people in the field to use the technology and equipment wisely. Or use it at all. And there's a lot of training issues, attitude issues, cultural issues. It isn’t just technology. So that ninth mode, information, it relies on this technology, doesn't it? But only if done well, not badly. Up to now, we've done poorly. We haven't tied technology to process well enough. Not well enough to reduce the human input. And we rely on humans for data, especially the customer. In relying on the customer to input data is a losers game, straight and simple. If you see it, shoot it in the heart and go for something else. The customer's simply too busy, doesn't care or expects you to do it.

So let's get smart and lets field it, lets field AIT. AIT is the key if done well. That's one of the things we're hoping to accomplish during this test period, which started last week and will run through October on four critical tests. We chose four scenarios to propel us to the next level, air cargo, ammunition, ocean moves and unit moves. Now, AIT is a key to our futures success. We've got to improve how we alternate so that we can simplify the information flow, the timeliness, the accuracy and the reliability, it's very important. And it must be totally compatible with our commercial partners systems. Everything from the global transportation network which today takes direct commercial feeds from CSX, FedEx and Sea Land. And we are inexplicably linked with our commercial partners and peace and war in any approach that we choose, must be done that way. If we take our eye off that ball, then we're dead.

Now, please understand we're going into this execution of these four tests with an open mind. There are no preconceived conclusions, and in fact they are already under way. However, we do have some objectives in mind. We want to determine the best AIT media for wartime and peace time for the whole logistics pipeline for integration and business processes and life cycle costs. Second, we want to validate a set of very tough but very necessary new data timeliness standards – DOD’S, AIT, Concept Device has now set those standards. If you're in DOD, you need to read them, because you must have them by the end of the year.

We're already up and running in TRANSCOM and we have most of them already done. These criterias for supplying data, supplies those data to the end users, that's the most important thing: For unit moves and air moves, one hour after cargo’s arrival or departure, and the customer demands it at that level now; for interstates shipments two hours, for ocean cargo four hours. We actually meet these standards today, in many cases. We're doing it in real war contingencies and we got to go automatic.

We recently moved twelve thousand people and twelve thousand tons, and by the way it always works out that way, about a ton per person. We did it in February, moved it to the desert and when our airplanes were taking off at the airfield in Georgia, the war fighters on the receiving end were querying when the gear was going up, they wanted to see where it was right then and it was still seventeen, eighteen hours away. We achieved ninety six percent in transit visibility, data where you can view it within one hour after take off, ninety-eight percent on passengers, but the data was only seventy percent reliable and that's where the AIT is going to help an awful lot.

We also wanted to determine the AIT fly away kit composition and ownership. Fly away kits are portable quick step kits containing OMC, two dimension bar codes, RF tags and set communications capability. We want to establish the baseline for TRANSCOM’s implementation plan. What we have to get, not just from the prototype but from the whole AIT effort, is a buy in from industries, the vendors, the carriers and our own transportation people and the customer. Don't ever forget the customer talking about the entire spectrum, from mom and pop industries, to transportation giants, to supply sergeants, to war fighting CINCS. Users always find better ways to use AIT. Our four DOD prototypes will use optical memory cards, 2-D bar code labels, satcom tracking and RF tags. Europe is the basic test bed, we're looking at cargo going to Europe and troops returning to CONUS.

In the first scenario, the air cargo scenario, we're involving two channels for sustainment cargo; one from a DLA consolidation point through Dover Air Force Base, our super port, and Ramstein Air Base, our biggest port overseas, through the European theater distribution center, to designated air force and army supply activities in Germany and in Bosnia. The second channel goes from DLA depots in Richmond and Norfolk through Norfolk and Sicily, Italy aerial ports to an air craft carrier deployed in the Mediterranean.

What are some of the expected benefits? Finding out how well optical memory cards, and RF tags work for port consolidation and deconsolidation for both supply and transportation are just two, but very real benefits that we'll be learning. We also want to look at how we can more effectively use AIT in our business practices that support this particular movement and in our automated systems. Right now, when we move things through Dover, there's a bar code on everything, this takes it to the next level.

The second scenario, the ammunition scenario actually began as an army initiative about two years ago. It involves tracking AIT use from crane ammunition depot in Indiana through Sunny Point, North Carolina to Nordanham, Germany to ammunition supply points in Europe. The first ammo ship will depart Sunny Point in November on that test. The anticipated benefits? Increased data accuracy and maximum source data automation, paperless operations, reduced manual operations and ITV.

The third scenario, the ocean move scenario also involves two cargo channels. One from the DLA consolidation points at Susquehenna, Pennsylvania and Richmond, Virginia through selected commercial terminals in conus through the theater distribution centers to designated supply activities in Germany. The second, channel originates in DLA Richmond, and Norfolk to a Navy containerization point and then through commercial and military terminals to the Mediterranean deployed air craft carriers again. So, it's all kind of feeding right on top of each other. Since commercial ocean carriers provide the major portion of our sea lift capability, over ninety-two percent, they will allow their containers to be tagged and RF readers to be put into their terminals. We'll compare the tracking data to what we get by EDI. What are the benefits? Again, accountability of contents with RF tags, OMC and 2-D bar coding, rapid consolidation of new loads with OMC and 2-D bar coding and ITB.

And the fourth and final scenario, which has already begun, we're using AIT media during the Army’s 2^nd armored cavalry regiment redeployment from Bosnia to Fort Polk, Louisiana. Here we'll learn more about 2-D bar coding and RF tags and satellite tracking work in a steer and mature theater environments both.

Each of these scenarios involves structured performance measures and evaluations which will reduce findings of AIT effects on operations and information systems. There are deeply objectives associated with each, and also TRANSCOM goals. I will not go into those in any details, but we have nine of those goals at the DOD level and nine at the TRANSCOM level that are corollaries to it. The important point is that we are not especially committed to any outcome on these four prototypes. We're looking to them to build upon where we are now and to take us even higher. We are committed to the concept of AIT prototyping and early user involvement and product assessment and tactics development. There's a lot of tactics in this.

An important key to the process is the support of all of you. We need you to share your vision with us as we work to leverage the AIT technology of the commercial world. That's very important. We need you to work with us. We ask you to take a hard look at the outcome of these prototypes. See if we're going in the right direction, we don't have the answers, we just have the vector to direction. If we're not, we need to know, and we need to know it as quickly as possible so that we can be agile and move off thirty degrees to the left or one hundred eighty degrees in reverse. We're looking for answers to simple questions. What works? What doesn't work? What works, but costs too much? What works with what we can afford? And we’re looking for solutions that strengthen our partnership. This incredible partnership that we have between US commercial transportation and US national defense transportation in the military is unknown in any other country. It is one of the secret weapons that ties together our national strategy and our national military strategy. It shapes the world. We are the legs of the strategy. We're looking to strengthen the partnership with our customers and our commercial partners so that its all synchronized. It's a big task, and you're playing a very important role in what you’re doing here today and how over the next month or two, we could really put something on the wall, that sticks to the wall, and carries us into that next dimension. I thank you very much for the opportunity to be here with you today and to be part of the conference. Thank you.

Walton: First, we’ll have Mike Wolfe’s summary and overview. Then, we'll move into the reaction to recommendations, and then we'll conclude after the panel discussion with a very brief closure by Jon Helmick. Jon is the Director of Logistics and Intermodal Translation Program at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point. He holds the rank of Commander in the U.S. Maritime service, he is also director of the National Institute of Maritime Research and Education that was established by the Maritime Administration at the Academy in 1997. You should know that Dr. Helmick has some 20 years in the industry as a merchant marine officer, consultant and vice president of operations for a startup steamship line. Which means he has considerable background and knowledge in the Maritime field. He also holds the U.S. Coast Guard Unlimited Master's License, which is also impressive to me. He has published extensively in the intermodal area and we're very pleased to have his involvement and participation as moderator for the closing session. By this time you all know Mike – he's going to tell us what we've done. Mike.

Wolfe: First thing I would like to do is to start with a show of hands. Could I see a show of hands of everyone here who lives or has lived in New England? Okay, I'm astounded that Mike Walton’s hand didn't go up, because he has run a classic New England town meeting, in terms of the session we had before lunch. The whole business of people counting in different areas and collecting the counts. That's democracy New England style. So, well done.

There are nine or ten of us who were involved during lunch in pulling together the themes for this summary session. And that included the focus group leaders and several folks who'd been on the preparation steering committee and in no particular order, that's Mike Onder, Bill Hamlin, Nora Ryan, Nancy McLaughlin, Ann Aylward, M.J. Fiocco, Molly Markert, Lance Grenzeback, and Joe Sussman. One of the things I would like to do before I get into projects is just to share a couple of observations with you.

In terms of the three special tasks assigned to the breakout groups, what I heard was that one group came up with the clearest statement I've seen to date in terms of the benefits of harmonization. And very neatly clarifying the distinction between the benefits of ITS and doing things more productively and the benefits to be achieved from harmonizing. Those were, economies of scale, accelerating the deployment of innovation, and the achievement of benefits. We had a group on impediments that did a phenomenal job of laying out and articulating what the impediments are, putting them in priority order, and setting up the frame work to be able to run those priorities against some of the projects. And we had three different groups that went in and cut the very messy issue of requirements in a number of different and complimentary ways. And all of those I think are worth while steps forward. So tip of the hat to all involved in that.

Now in terms of the projects, I want to do this in kind of a three step exercise. One is to share with you the combined results from the voting that took place, in the session before, and then pull out a couple of themes that appear to stand out from that. And then share with you our cut as to how the pieces and priorities fit together, and what makes sense in terms of next steps. There are four parts that list in declining priority order the particular projects. Mike Walton guided us through different votings on different votes and approaches to voting on the different pages. Those votes reflect a group of people who were selected and who self selected to come to this group. And it reflects the distribution of those of us who are here. So it's heavy in some areas and it's light in others; light from the point of view of labor and from the air mode.

The four project areas are: cross cutting industry or industry government working groups, a second cluster that had to do with hardware and software, a third on assessments, and a fourth dealing with architecture and standards. And as we worked with those, a couple of things came clear to us and I want to share those with you.

This proposed effort is expected to take place under an intermodal freight, cross cutting, cross industry, cross government working group, very much building on what Group E put before us this morning. The core working group, in our sense, merits dual sponsorship, or co-chairs. Bill Hamlin volunteered to be one of those chairs or to be a chair of a part of this. Our sense is that the other co-chair ought to come out of government, and given the intermodal freight focus that the proper place for that is the Office of Intermodalism in DOT. So the group provides co-chairs from industry and the DOT Office of Intermodalism.

They and the core group need to get started on flushing out linkages to other groups and teams that are in place so that we build on what others are doing rather than reinvent wheels and frustrate and irritate people by asking them to do the same thing in multiple locations, at multiple times. There is some serious work that needs to be done in organizational planning for the structure, the organization, and resources. Our sense is that we're putting together something fairly ambitious in terms of tying together the pieces, and giving it some continuity. That effort needs more than just the volunteer time of a few folks with five or ten percent of their time. We need to think through issues of resources and staff support for this group. They need to come up with a concrete plan. There is a cluster of interest around the cost benefit assessments of industry innovation, and freight communication technologies.

There is a second cluster or two of tasks that have to do with keeping a good finger for industry and non DOD players on two major DOD activities, one is demonstrations and tests for technologies that Ed Coyle gets to dream about every night, and the other are Brian Sharkey's programs at DARPA. The third bullet, the container chassis fleet tagging assessments, deals with a couple of projects that were lifted around looking at the feasibility of tagging all containers, universal fleet, and at looking at trade-offs at tagging chassis. And that's a study to be flushed out. It makes sense to get other case studies which still need to be identified.

Second major concentration is doing assessments of pilot projects that focussed on having near term results that make a difference, that are visible in the world in short term. And one that clearly was highly ranked was the whole notion of a super reader or universal reader. The float side of that was the question of looking at universal or broad based tags. There's a piece there that's both assessment and also doing some demonstrating testing. Security tags, tags to support security related issues, was the second one. There are others to be flushed out including trade-offs of optical character recognition or image recognition and RFID. And someone brought up the question about looking further at space based or GPS kinds of location tracking. Finally, the information system architecture and standards should be addressed by the core group to find out what it involves and how it should happen. So, that's our cut.

Helmick: As we steam into port here, I think it might be appropriate to take a moment to compliment and commend Mike Walton for the superb job he's done in keeping the ship on course and on schedule here throughout these couple of days. A great deal of thought and effort has gone into the preparation of this workshop. From the initial planning for the event through the preparation of the papers, through the presentations, the breakout sessions, and the analysis and presentation of those results today. A lot of dedicated people have worked hard to carefully identify the issues with which we've addressed. Now it's time for some representative response or reaction to what transpired here in the past couple of days. And the distinguished speakers on this panel who represent various industry sectors, the military and the federal government will provide their analysis of the products of this workshop and if time permits, we'll get into some discussion at the end involved in the audience. Four of our six panelists have previously been introduced, so I'm not doing it again and our first panelist, Paul Pavlick, President of Bridge Terminal Transport is ready to go.

Pavlick: Thank you Jon. Thank you everybody. Before getting into an evaluation of the recommendations that have come forth, I think I'll need to go back to yesterday morning for a moment or two; in answer to the two questions that I had in my mind. The first question I had in my mind was I don't have a clue why I'm here. Well, I have a lot more clues than I had yesterday morning. There are still a couple of clouds, I must admit, flailing around back there. But, I'm reasonably sure why I came and I'm reasonably sure why I made the decision to get off I-95 and to get on I-66. The other question that I had yesterday was from a selfish point of view. Was I going to get more out of this, than I was going to contribute?

And the answer to that is absolutely yes. I did. I want to thank everyone here for the wonderful learning experience that I've had. For the wonderful dialogues that I've been able to listen to and participate in. For a lot of the side comments during social times that we've had together. I've learned a lot. Now how much good that's going to do, I don't know. But at least I've learned a lot. To get into the specifics, my initial reactions to why this group was here was in very basic terms, to address two issues. How can we capture information better than we do it today? How do we share the information better than we do it today?

The real business world would indicate to us that the information needed to be captured and needed to be shared, is being done. The information is there. How does it get there? How accurate it is? We could probably argue that. How easily it gets shared? How well it gets shared? We could argue that as well.

But it doesn't seem to me from any of this discussions that I've heard, that we're really trying to change any of the essences of business process. We're trying to improve upon them. And I believe that that is the absolute proper approach. If we can make data collection more economic, we can make larger distribution of data much simpler and much more usable. Wow, have we accomplished a lot.

The recommendations, especially the detailed ones have a lot of innovation in them. We had a lot of what I would refer to as futuristic approaches. One has to wonder at what point in time will the things that we talked about become a requirement of business, and will become a requirement of business when there's a need, and that need will be driven by the economics of the business involved. I'd like to make a couple of suggestions in terms of a little bit of methodology, and we may not be there as a group, but just a couple of suggestions.

As we go on building on information technology, keep it modular, keep it simple, and let's keep it based upon the requirements of the businesses that we're in. Lets build on existing information but capture it and distribute it differently. Please no overkills and please no duplications. Also to think about, the differences between data exchange and distribution on a need basis as compared with some mega data base housed somewhere that everybody in the world can get into. I think we need to keep a view on having the evolution of our ordination and data capture and data distribution kept on a very practical level and on a very business economic level. Thank you very much for the invitation, I've had a good time. I hope to see some of you again. Thanks.

Helmick: Thank you Paul, and our next panelist is Ed Coyle with the DOD perspective.

Coyle: I have one really important perspective to, that I think everyone needs to take home. Earlier in the day, one of the groups, and I don't know exactly the background of what was up on the slide, but one of them emphasized the differences between DOD and commercial.

I would like to tell everyone in the room to forget that, and I would like to tell you that from where I sit in the AIT, there are virtually no differences between the commercial and the DOD. Now don't take that the wrong way. I could sit up here and emphasize the differences and talk about national will and the military power of the economic power and how we operate in the world, and how DOD is an arm of our government and I could go on and on about the differences and the different missions. But the fact of the matter is, I would expect that maybe, now someone may remember a few Christmases ago, if I were a retailer in the United States and I had an intermodal company with a container load of "Tickle-Me-Elmo's," I would be pounding on that company to get them to me before Christmas. And I would expect that what we do in DOD, when we need a piece of freight is to pound on our intermodal customers, or excuse me providers, as a customer to make sure that we have what we need. They're obviously worlds apart, but from your customer’s perspective, it's the same thing.

I would also like to, if anyone made notes on what Mr. Emahiser said and then what we heard at lunch today. You heard a great disparity on what kinds of support DOD gets from the commercial sector. We need to ask, are we counting shipments, or are we counting tons? When you look at the difference between 95% of what we move is in the commercial sector and 50% of what we move is in the commercial sector. If we're moving a unit, an army unit of tanks, and that's a shipment, it's a whole lot different than a shipment of a one pound FedEx overnight package which has to be there. So those numbers can vary greatly according to who you're talking to. Make sure you know, you understand what the speaker is talking about.

But the most important part of this summary is to emphasize the pieces that are the same. And I would tell you that from our microcosm, our AIT project, we clearly had to separate the gathering of data from the use of the data and the accumulation of the data at a higher level where it creates a higher good. And it really emphasizes what Paul said. Get the information that's important for your business, you're sector and be willing to share it. Understand who needs it and what they can do with it, and then share that information. And that information then becomes valuable to a third party, if not to yourself as a third party. The ocean carrier information becomes extremely important to the drayman or the rail operator. And so concentrate on making sure that everyone understands what data you have, that they know how to get at it, and facilitate the movement of that data, and the creation of really strong business partners, because there is an economic payback and the groups that will be taking a look at the projects here, probably the most important thing you'll be taking a look at are those business plans, or better yet, those business economic cost analyses.

We are making an investment. That's the whole purpose of the prototype that we're running. We've used tags and DOD before and have been tremendously successful. They've never been integrated and we've never pushed them in to change our business practices. We are changing the business practices, we're measuring changes to business practices in the prototype and that's really where you need to take the commercial side here, because DOD relies on you. That's the information that we're looking for. The processes that we're running are virtually the same. I surely will share the information that we bring together in our measures so that you can see how we've looked at the economic benefits in our business case analysis. And you can use those as a departure for whatever pieces fit correctly in this process. I think we're headed in the right direction.

Helmick: Ed, thank you. Our third panelist this afternoon is Rich Overholt from Norfolk Southern.

Overholt: Thank you Jon. And thank you everyone else. I've been sitting here trying to figure out what makes the most sense to add at this time. We certainly spent a lot of time trying to work through this equipment identification problem. We figure the best thing would be for me to share with you my self evaluation. Did it make sense to come here? What did I get out of this and probably the best way to start would be to show my goals coming into this. My thoughts were equipment identification process. How is this going to work well at the railroad? To do so, I need to understand the railroad’s business processes? The whole process. And then look at what the technology is that we have available in the future, and what's coming in the future and see how that technology is going to be able to help, not at just one piece of that process, but in the overall process.

So a couple of thoughts. When this is all done, how much more am I going to know about all that, and how much am I going to have helped the rest of you with what the railroads process is? I'm not sure of how much I've done on the latter, but on the former, I have a much better sense of where we're at. And although there seems to be an awful long way to go and an awful lot of people from a lot of different companies, different areas need to somehow pull together and talk through and work through all these difficult issues. I think that this is a very important forum and has been a very important workshop to get that started. And I graciously appreciate the sponsor in working through this. I've appreciated working with each of you and all the new contacts that have been made.

There is a long way to go, but I think with this kind of focus on it, we can get there. I look at what is the primary outcomes that I see from here? We've got a handful of projects. Some of them, I think, are excellent. I think that group E in particular, did a very good job identifying the cost benefit project as where we need to start. Whose going to win from this? We're all going to win. But how do we convince everyone and identify whose going to be able to pay for it and still come out ahead. Really that's it. I thank you all and look forward to the feedback in a couple months. There's an awful lot that we've done in the last couple of days to pull things together, but I am looking to see some progress on these projects. Thank you.

Helmick: Thank you Rich. Bob Clark of APL is up next.

Clark: Thank you Jon. Good afternoon. I see I have a timer here. I should have used that yesterday, I wouldn't of gone over. I appreciate the opportunity to be back up here. I think that the most important thing if you don't walk away with anything from this whole seminar, is basically whatever the technology is, it must provide value added bottom line requirements to the customer or it's absolutely the wrong technology.

Walking around and talking with you at some of the breaks this morning, after all the slides were put up, it was kind of funny, but people were kind of scratching their heads and looking at me and saying this is the same recommendations that we came up with ten years ago. So this is nothing new, and if we utilize the technology example of the Navy taking 40 years to go from sail to steam, then we have about 30 more years to go before we get anything done. So I would like to impress on you a little urgency in this matter.

The other thing that came up in one of the groups – "who is not here?" And the answer was labor, shippers and the airline. And I think that it is very important that we walk hand in hand with labor, I for one, work with organized labor which is the ILWU on the west coast every single day. It's quite a challenge and basically if you don't have them along with you, I don't care what comes up in this forum, we're not going to go anywhere, at least in my part of the business.

The General talked about the ninth mode, and getting the field to use the right technology, and I'm wondering, once we find out what that technology is, what are we going to do to trade off? How are we going to get it implemented? How are we actually going to make it work in the field?

One of the things we're getting away with is that the majority of people in this room are AEI tag crazy and maybe that's not a good analogy, but that's my opinion. And I would like to say that for APL with the different alliances that we have, we have approximately 800,000 containers in our system and where are the numbers if it costs $50 dollars to put a tag on one container, we're talking $40 million dollars. I don't think that's the answer, and even if it was I didn't hear anything about any ongoing maintenance, upkeep of the tags. You just can't tag something and forget about it and hope it's going to work. In my opinion, we need to place instrumentation packages on container handling equipment. And by doing that effectively, instrumenting and outfitting things under our control, and in effect introducing seamlessness, these should be the answer as far as I'm concerned.

And this technology works very, very well. We're going to pilot this in Seattle. I think it also has excellent military applications for people in the Department of Defense, because in effect you can set up virtual fields on the fly as containers flow. It's flexible, it's configurable, it's scalable, and compatible to both military and commercial needs. The General also talked about vectors for direction and looking for answers, and I think that this is something that we really need to look at because putting AEI tags on every single container is crazy in my opinion. So in closing, I would like to say transparent intermodalism as described above, and which we intend to pilot in Seattle, can be utilized for commercial and military means, and I think that this is exactly the way to go. Thank you.

Helmick: Thank you Bob. Our fifth panelist, Chuck Raymond, is Senior Vice-President & Chief Transportation Officer for Sea-Land Service, Inc. As such he's accountable for Sea-Land’s world-wide operations including, terminal operations, vessel operations, equipment control purchasing, equipment, in-land operations. Chuck is a graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and the Harvard Business School Advance Management Program. He's had a distinguished career in the transportation industry beginning when he first sailed as a deck officer for Sea-Land. Chuck has contributed to a number of panels relating to transportation, research and education, including many of those with the TRB and the U.S. Department of Transportation. And I should say that Chuck and his colleague, Bill Hamlin, have been an integral part of the development of this workshop. Chuck.

Raymond: Thank you Jon. Thank you for the comments on Bill Hamlin. Bill will continue to work on the project that you laid out and I'll tell you Sea-Land will continue to pay him while he does that. Enough said Bill. Also he's big enough.

I understand two unions were invited here. We'll offer help in getting them involved. Let me pick up on something that Ed Coyle said with regard to the military. Having been stationed in Europe for a few years when we started up Sea-Land, I could remember these very detailed TCMD's coming over there and all of the issues we had with the Department of Defense business, but one characteristic of the military, which by the way our largest customer at Sea-Land is that they had one thing that they told us that no other customer ever told us. And that was the required delivery date. No matter what shipment it was, it's documentation included a required delivery date. We never got that from our commercial customers, and we don't get it today.

What happens is you got a guy that makes sneakers in Korea and he books the shipment on a particular ship or sailing that meets his requirements, and what he wants is his bill awaiting so that he can go back to the bank, get more dollars, buy more raw materials and sell more sneakers to Reebok. And we ocean carriers cover all that freight, we run it as fast as we can across the ocean, get to the U.S. put it on a rail, take it to Boston and then it sits there for three weeks or four weeks while Reebok figures out what happened. Because they weren't tied into that shipment from the beginning to the end. Now military doesn't always turn to cargo real fast, but they do know where the cargo is and they do expect it to come there because they have something to do with it when it gets there. So we can learn from the military and I maintain that we need to keep DOD very involved in its process, because I do believe that there's a lot of learning that can take place.

When you think about the container today, think about an analogy of a football game. We've all played touch football, at least probably, and there's two ways you can play this game. You can play it with a plan. You can go into the huddle and have a play and say okay, we're going to run this play. Or, you can do what we used to do as kids and play razzle/dazzle. The way we handle freight today is very much like a razzle/dazzle football game. Nobody knows the play. You're not communicating with one another ahead of time. You probably haven't played with the players before very much. It's a disaster. And when you think about it, you're playing it with blind folds on, and no play plan. Why is that? Because we don't know where the container is. Now I may know that if I'm in Korea that I'm putting it on the ship, but I guarantee you that at that time the Union Pacific has no idea that we're planning on giving them that box.

If you want to win you better have a play. We believe that having a trip plan for every single shipment, and we handle a million point eight a year which is intricate to our service. If we don't know what we're going to do with that box, we’re not going to do a good job of it. And you can’t do that if you don't have updates. If you don't have cover data, you can't communicate to your partner when he's going to expect that handoff. And that's where most of these errors take place in international transportation is in the handoff; from one mode to the next mode. You can't do that if you don't have good data. So we fully endorse the need through these shipping plans to have consistent information, to have it be accurate and timely.

National competitors, let’s forget about the international aspects of trade for a minute and think about the United States. We do business in a lot of different countries and a lot more of our business is outside of the U.S. than is inside the U.S. But when you get down to it, every day we see residents coming out of Texas going to Latin America to make bags for bananas. They're competing with residents coming out of Germany. We see cotton coming out of Mississippi going to Asia to make shirts. That same cotton's coming out of Uruguay. We see products all over the world competing with U.S. products. Furniture out of North Carolina, from hickory competing with the same kind of furniture out of Brazil to be sold in Moscow.

And as a country if we're going to be successful we've got to have a transportation system that is absolutely going to be able to compete in this new world of globalization. And somebody said it earlier today, information is really the business. What customers want, they don't care who's name is on the side of that box. What they want is, they want service, they want to know where their cargo is and they want to be able to change in transit. You know "The Limited’s" got undyed sweaters coming across the Pacific because when they get to the United States, they want to make the call as quickly as the market changes to move those undyed sweaters to the South Atlantic, turn green and sell them in the stores in April. They don't want to order the stuff five months in advance and have it be out of style or out of stock. So the information in transit is going to be more and more of a requirement as we customize our services to our customers. And customization, whether you're in the furniture business, the hamburger business, the automobile business, computers, that's what the customers are calling for. And if you're going to be successful in the market place or on the globe, we've got to be able to do that.

I'll throw a solution out in terms of marking the boxes. There are 9.5 million containers out there right now and every single one of them that is owned by a carrier has a logo on it. It could be a Universe Flying logo, or Sea-Land logo, or an APL logo, or a K-line, its got somebody’s’ name on it. The customer doesn't give a damn about that logo. They cost $120 a piece to put on the box. To put any kind of a transponder on the box, it costs $50. What would you rather do when you came to this conference? Step up to the table and ask to have a sign on your chest that says I'm Al Herberger? Not that he's not a good guy, I mean a lot of us would like to look like him. Or would you rather be able to come here and talk and tell people what you are and where you're going? And that's what the container carriers are doing. They put their name on the box, but they haven't been able to say, you know, "where is the box?" What's more important? Yeah, you can fund it.

We will as carriers fund the technology that’s necessary, the marking that's necessary, the labeling that's necessary to provide that information to our customers. Why? Because the customers will require it. And I think one of the real steps that has to take place here is to bring a broader array besides DOD, of commercial customers in because the supply chain today is really, really sloppy. It’s terrible. When you think about building ships that go 25 or 26 knots like the Sea-Land ships, it gets the cargo to the United States and then it gets all screwed up in the intermodal system. We got a tremendous opportunity to practice, to improve that entire origin to destination process. And in order to do it, we've got to have our customers tell us "look, if you're willing to do this, I'm going to do `x` for you," and the carriers will respond. Thank you.

Helmick: Thank you Chuck. I think personally given the choice that you proposed, I may be very happy to have the name tag that said Al Herberger on it. But, you're points well taken. Excellent one. Okay, today's sixth and final panelist is M.J. Fiocco. She is the freight transportation specialist in DOT's Office of Intermodalism. In this capacity she serves as liaison between that office and diverse public and private sector constituents. And as a representative to two federal regions. M.J. has wide range of expertise and goods movement in the intermodal context. Prior to joining DOT in 1994 she served the NITL for 14 years as their Congressional Relations Program Manager. She's also been an assistant editor at traffic world, and she's been a key contributor to this event. M.J.

Fiocco: One of the problems with speaking last is that a lot of what you want to say gets said ahead of you. So, I think if I had something to say today and what I took away from this, is coming into this conference, I think many of us in the department had a clear question. That is, whether there was a role for government in improving intermodal freight services?

I think this conference in this past day and a half has shown that there is clearly a role for us as a convener and a facilitator and I think that’s a very important accomplishment. I also want to say that what we're doing here today fits very well with what the Department is trying to do with its new management strategy of one DOT, and Secretary Slater’s direction on the four "I’s" – that we are international in reach, intelligent in nature, intermodal in the services we offer, and inclusive to the people we reach out to. And I think what we are starting here today, very well fits that model. We are working at DOT to give you better government that is more integrated.

One of the highlights of this seminar is that it is not just the Office of Intermodalism or the Joint Program Office, but also FRA, MARAD, and all across the department people with freight interests pulled together to make this conference possible. I think you made if very worthwhile and I think we have the beginnings of something that is quite impressive. I can assure you that the Office of Intermodalism will work with our counterparts in the private sector to take the ambitious plan that Mike Wolfe laid out, and do our best to make it a reality as quickly as is possible.

Quite frankly, I think that maybe our problem isn't technology, but facing much tougher problems which are the institutional issues we all bring as we try and serve our diverse customers in a very competitive world. That's going to take time and patience from all of you and I hope we can count on all of you to be here and not lose what we have gained at this conference. As we reach out to you, next month, the month after and that we all become partners in the long term to meet Chuck Raymond's challenge of having the world’s top transportation system, where we have a game plan for every shipment. Thank you.

Helmick: Thank you M.J. I think we've had some very insightful comments and reactions to what's gone on here. Now I'd like to ask if there are any reactions to these reactions or questions or other comments from the audience. Anybody?

Member: Hi, my name is Mark Berndt. I'm from the Minnesota Department of Transportation and I would just like to add a couple of things that I can maybe offer a little bit different perspective then what we've heard a lot of today. And part of it has to do with, we talked about benefits and harmonization.

I think those of us that are charged with highway assets and sort of Metropolitan State Planning Organizations, are really faced with some difficult challenges and I'd just like to point out that as we go forward on some of these projects how it would be very key to have a better understanding of trips and those sorts of things to be able to plan how to be able to deal with that infrastructure is just an example. I read lately where the railroads, there's talk about open access and how difficult would it be for a railroad to maintain and operate their system if the would be users of those systems didn't have to give any information about when trips would be generated. In Minnesota we're trying to do some things, my job right now is to try and advocate, be an advocate for freight users and generators, or freight generators and carriers, and get them in the planning process. And so this whole idea is real key because, if we know for instance which routes are well used we can maybe not fill potholes between the rush hour time because maybe that's a high commerce time. Maybe we can target roads that need to be plowed first, because those are roads that are often used by freight carriers, but maybe not so used by passengers. So, I just wanted to add those comments as a potential benefit from this sort of thing, where you can go to one place and maybe get data on all the types of modes without having to do individual studies. Often times at the state level we’re working with static data, that’s two or three years old and trying to react to a very dynamic environment.

Helmick: Thank you. Any comment responding to the panel. I might note that the Transportation Research Board is working pretty hard on issues related to intermodal freight data and identifying the needs with respect to that at this moment, so that would tie in, I think, to what you had to say. Other comments, observations?

I will make the observation that this has been an extremely productive event. It strikes me that there’s been a real spirit of cooperation here, and it’s not been just a feel good session, but that there’s some tangible projects and meaningful output has emerged from it. I’d also say that a couple of the terms we’ve heard frequently are "value added" and "cost effective." My sense is that this panel here today has been real value added and a very cost effective use of our time here this afternoon. So, if you would please join me in thanking them. And with that we’ll turn it back to Mike Walton for the conclusion.

Walton: Jon, thank you very much and thank all the panelists for a job well done. Let me in a very brief time re-visit our objective. As you recall, this is where we started yesterday to bring together leaders in the public and private sector, to collaboratively set an action agenda to address interoperability issues and the intermodal freight location identification. Do you think we’ve achieved a step in that direction?

Okay, let’s go on to another one. Do our goals then, and I think that as Mike Wolfe summarized your deliberations and put in place, I think, a framework for the next steps. I do believe that we could make significant progress. And I hope you agree as well. I think we’ve come a long way together and I do believe that after a little polishing of the work that you have done and that has been captured that we will set out the action agenda in a more specific way.

Each of you will be asked to participate and a note was passed to me that a concern about missing a great opportunity of getting you to sign up now – before you leave the room. You have to sign up for a project before you leave. If any of you would be willing to volunteer for any of the action items that you recall being presented. I would encourage you to give your card to Mike Onder and specify which particular initiative that you might be interested in. I will tell you however, the game plan was to come back out with the polished list, so to speak, and give you again not only the opportunity, but to encourage you to sign up for one of the initiatives.

I think we still have some work to do on placing a priority. We can’t do everything. We can target a few. So again if there are specific ones that you’re interested in, now is the time to do it. That at least gives us a few people that target for a core group. But if not within two to three weeks, right? You will have the opportunity to do that. Why don’t we go to the next one for a moment.

Let me again recognize Mike Onder, Gordon Fink, and Carl Seiberlich. I think they’ve done an extraordinary job and I’d like to have them stand up one more time.

I think this is, as most of you know, this has been an extraordinary effort on a lot of people’s part. We apologize if we’ve missed others who participated in the activities that’s gone on, it seems like forever, quite frankly. It’s been an extraordinary effort we’d also again like to thank the facilitators and the recorders. I think their participation was fundamental to the success of the breakout activities, and that was key.

ITS America staff in addition to Gordon Fink, Rick Schuman, and there are a number of others here in ITS America who have helped us immensely with the logistics of an activity like this, moving along and the progress that we’ve been able to make. I’ve pointed out, that if any of you are interested in the National Architecture for ITS, that it’s all captured on one CD. If any of you would be interested in one CD with the National ITS Architecture, we only have three copies, but we can get more. If you would give your card or information to Roy, he will make sure that you’re provided with a single copy of the National Architecture for ITS. And I think many of you may be interested in it.

Lastly, is there anything else that anyone would like to add? Any comments? Any thoughts? We would encourage you to respond. We feel that we’ve made progress. It’s an effort that began many, many, it seems like many, many months ago, now. We’ve come together in a much more collaborative way in this effort than we have previously. But is there anything else for the good of the order? If not, as we adjourn this meeting give yourself a round of applause please to an outstanding job. We are adjourned.