Industry is increasing the use of smart container technology and IoT devices within their supply chains to improve security, visibility, and plan more efficiently.  These IoT devices transmit the location of the assets to which they are attached, however the context of where the assets are at that point in time is often not known unless it is part of the transport plan and being within an existing geofence.

Many parties can be involved in a transport movement, and container owners may make use of several vendors of devices, along with shippers own IoT devices being deployed there is currently no single definition of a facility, or methodology to define those facilities with a geofence.

This leads to duplicated effort and more importantly differences between definition of the same facility (terminal, berth, container facility or other) and there is no guidance on how to draw these geofences or to improve quality when reviewing them.

BIC Facility Codes and SMDG Terminal Codes are child codes of the UNLOCODE and code list publishers for these facilities, the purpose of this paper is to define the rules for their respective facilities and outlining the methodology, providing consistency and a drive towards quality geofences that can be used and trusted in industry.

A sample of business cases that this will facilitate:

◦	Reduce time to implementation and ROI for smart containers
◦	Automation of Gate-In and Gate-Out events at a depot
◦	Realtime depot reconciliation, check live container stock at a facility without manual inventory checks
◦	Schedule deviation alerts allow exceptions to be reported when a container deviates from the transport plan
◦	Identification of short shipped containers or overlanded containers
◦	Ability to build additional zones-of-interest such as berths in an ocean terminal or customs areas within a depot on top of standard-agreed base facilities 
 

To review current practices, document and outline the recommendations to geofencing for BIC and SMDG facilities 

Scope of the paper will cover the facilities such as:
Ocean Terminals, Container Depots, Repair Yards, Freight Stations, Rail Yards, etc.

It will not focus on defining rules for Shipper or Consignee Facilities.

It will outline the rule sets for different ‘families’ of geofences and how to define them, demonstrate examples with quality markers, and explain acceptable shapes, provide guidance for a process to support a review panel in evaluating geofences.  Publication of geofences and structure will also be defined in the paper.

The project will be limited to child code facilities of the UNLOCODE and for each recommendation the code list provider must participate to be included in publication.

The project deliverable is:
A.	White Paper

Membership is open to UN/CEFACT experts with broad knowledge in the area of: Geofencing, IoT, UNLOCODE, Transport and Logistics, Smart Containers or other relevant areas.
In addition, Heads of Delegations may invite technical experts from their constituency to participate in the work.
Experts are expected to contribute to the work based solely on their expertise and to comply with the UN/CEFACT Code of Conduct and Ethics and the policy on Intellectual Property Rights.

Global

The following contributions are submitted as part of this proposal. It is understood that these contributions are only for consideration by the Project Team and that other participants may submit additional contributions in order to ensure that as much information as possible is obtained from those with expertise and a  material interest in the project. It is also understood that the Project Team may choose to adopt one or more of these contributions “as is”.

Participants in the project shall provide resources for their own participation. The existence and functioning of the project shall not require any additional resources from the UNECE secretariat.