CHARLOTTE, NC – Horizon Lines Inc. has turned to radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to track containers seamlessly from a Seattle distribution center over the sea and land to their final destination in Alaska, according to ComputerWorld newspaper.

While containers can be monitored while in ships and trains, historically, they vanish into black holes when being trucked on highways, according to Rick Kessler, CIO of Horizon Lines and its Information Technology subsidiary, Horizon Services Group. The lack of RFID readers near many remote highways creates an “intermodal black hole,” where passive RFID chips cannot be read. Passive RFID tags have no local power source and must be contacted by readers before they can transmit data, using the reader as a source of energy, and are generally limited to a few feet in range.

To overcome the lack of highway readers, the company placed active RFID tags, which use an internal power source to contact readers, on 5,100 containers. The active tags have a range of about 300 feet and can be read while moving at speeds of up 75 miles per hour, according to ComputerWorld. The active RFID tags used were from Identec Solutions Inc., a U.K.-based maker of RFID systems. Also participating in the pilot was Safeway Inc., a Pleasanton, Calif.-based retail grocer that ships goods to its Alaska stores on Horizon trucks.

The implementation, completed last fall, required placing readers at two strategic spots on the primary truck routes in Alaska — one of the readers is an hour from a Safeway store near the North Pole. A container full of goods can be tracked on the trek there from Safeway’s Pacific Seattle distribution centers up to its stores in Anchorage.

Ultimately, Horizon would like to tag every container in its entire fleet, creating supply chain visibility all the way from Hawaii, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the continental United States.