On June 9^th, 2010 Rainer Müller, member of the Institute for Shipping Economics and Logistics Bremen, presented the EU-funded project INTEGRITY (Intermodal Global Door-to-door Container Supply Chain Visibility) at the “Bremen Container Security Conference” in Shanghai. The conference entitled “Solutions for Enhancing Container Security Worldwide” was organised by the Ministry of Economic Affairs of the German Federal State of Bremen, the German Industry & Co. Ltd Shanghai and the German Logistics Association (BVL) and took place within the scope of the transport logistic China 2010 in Shanghai.

Since September 11^th, 2001 and various terrorist attacks the security of global maritime freight transport has become a main issue. The US seek to respond to the increased security need by 100% scanning of all maritime containers in the ports of their trading partners as of 2012.

An appropriate technological solution to increase the security of container transport could be a satellite-based container surveillance system. This is the main research focus of the presented INTEGRITY project and its IT platform SICIS (Shared Intermodal Container Information System). SICIS tracks containers along the entire logistics chain and registers all data and related events which are generated during the transport. Demonstrations of SICIS successfully showed that container using satellite based Container Security Devices (CSDs) will lead to the enhancement of transparency and will result in the increase of container security at the same time.

The discussion with all presenters and the auditorium of the conference indicated that the usage of CSDs could be an alternative to the claimed 100% scanning. Furthermore, a neutral system like SICIS could help to integrate all needed data into a single platform.