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Almost 90% of the world trade is accomplished with the help of containers using different means of transportation including ships and trains. The container trade faces a lot of challenges comprising of container tracking, real time monitoring and intrusion detection, real time theft reporting mechanism, and status reporting of shipment items. While in principle the above functionality can be provided by state of the art industrial monitoring systems, it does not provide the advantages in flexibility and cost of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In combination with GSM and GPS/Galileo technologies, WSNs can result in a system capable of tracking and monitoring of containers in the real time. This paper discusses the problems faced by the container industry, how a wireless sensor network can help solving these problems, and the challenges ahead.

-In this paper a new way of transporting parts in production systems is described. Based on the fact that in nature the highest speeds are reached at flight, a bio-inspired technical approach for the fast transportation of objects is derived. Objects shall be thrown by a throwing device and are caught again by a catching device. Such a transport approach requires besides proper working throwing and catching devices a high precision object detection mechanism. For object detection a 3D Photonic Mixer Device (PMD) sensor is proposed. By assembling of this sensor on the catching device, it can detect the flying objects on their trajectories like a raptor which is hunting a prey. The technical feasibility of this concept is investigated and possible applications are described.