Containers under control
Page 42
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KEEPING TRACK of some 12,000 ISO containers circulating in industry, on freight routes in the UK and the Continent and at sea on ships plying between Europe and Australasia is a major communications task for Overseas Containers Ltd. However, using its IBM 360/40 magnetic disc storage computers to process a sophisticated container control system no containers haves ever been lost. At any time each container can be located and its direction and status — loaded or empty, on wheels or at sea — identified.
The control system is based on standard times which a container may reasonably be expected to be in a terminal, in a customer's premises, on a road journey or at sea. Container performance is monitored against these times by the computer which prints out a report if one becomes overdue. Such reports then lead to the instigation of a manual check on the location and status of that particular container.
Information needed by the computer is fed to it from all OCL's terminals where the staff keep manual checks on containers within their operating area. Every .change in status is recorded. That is when a container is delivered to a customer, when returned to terminal, when it is dispatched to the port and any other material change in its use. Such information is sent from the .terminals via a telewriter machine which is linked directly to the computer in OCL's London h.q. Each terminal has allocated transmission times so that the computer intake is not overloaded.
Information regarding loads in containers is transmitted from terminals through telewriter machines to the central computer and to form complete ships' used manifests.
A twin computer system is in use in Australia so that information between the two systems is easily interchangeable — tapes are flown out once the ship puts to sea. A further system will be established in Japan when the OCL's Far East service starts, later in 1972 and the consortium will have the task of monitoring, among many other things, the movements of some 18,000 containers on land in three major areas of the world and at sea in 17 ships.