Electronic Freight Theft Management System for Florida

Abstract

An electronic freight theft management system has recently been developed by the Center for Advanced Transportation Systems Simulation. The system was designed to be a comprehensive online application for the reporting, documentation, and warehousing of information on intermodal freight theft and related occurrences. A hierarchical database structure is the foundation for data capture, storage, and retrieval. System deployment is intended to benefit conglomerate corporations, independent sole proprietor commercial vehicle operators, and law enforcement agencies. The online system can be used to assist law enforcement in prioritizing theft investigations or recovery operations by the significance level of the stolen cargo. If deployed nationally, it would offer criminal investigation officers a universal freight theft data system with interjurisdictional application and versatility to assist in cross-reference of available data through any available Internet connection and web browser. The system has been structured to allow application of data mining techniques to the database. The system has simplicity and scalability without loss of performance and has built-in alerts to identify stolen commodities that pose a possible threat to national homeland security. A system for Florida law enforcement has been designed and deployed. The new web-based system replaced the previous paper-based system that used a fax machine to distribute theft reports. The new system distributes reports and bulletins electronically via automated e-mails. This enhancement is projected to reduce response time significantly, provide greater accessibility to available data for officers, and increase the ability to provide more accurate theft recovery information.

Risk analysis of cargo theft from freight supply chains using a data-driven Bayesian network

“…Among the limited studies on cargo theft in the current literature, the majority focused on the countermeasures against different types of cargo theft accidents and the others were related to the exploration of the nature of cargo theft including the probabilities of the accidents and the relevant influential factors. More specifically, the issues such as a prevention approach [46], a communication system [20,23,26,37,60], and vehicular technology [10] were addressed. In 2009, Ekwall analysed and explained the reason why cargo theft continued to occur despite all the implemented countermeasures.…”

Internet-Based Mapping Prototype for Integration with an Electronic Freight Theft Management System

“…A web-based input form, which was developed for reporting freight theft in real time, feeds the underlying relevant tables in the database. Klodzinski et al (22) developed the database module, and only the theft data from the database are used in this work. Currently there is no support from ArcIMS to directly query the MS Access database.…”