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TAV Why Total Asset Visibility?
What Is It Anyway?
The United States Military is undergoing a fundamental transformation. This transformation is driven by the need for rapid deployment and troop sustainment for the duration of that deployment. Required is a military logistics system that can ensure correct, timely, cost effective, and repeatable deployment performance to rapidly emerging hotspots. That is, military logisticians are being challenged to perform deployments with short notice respective to who, what, where, and when.
Total Asset Visibility (TAV) is a goal for transforming the Department of Defense (DOD) logistics supply chain and is enabled by automatic identification technology (AIT), the name given to devices that can be used at nodes in the logistics supply chain to provide data (Figure 1) [1-4].
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a technology that enables logisticians to identify, categorize, and locate assets. This enabling technology has been termed in the DOD as Intransit Visibility (ITV) [5]. RFID technology is key to the DODs Logistics Transformation efforts-efforts to enable the Focused Logistics concept and the JSC JV 2020 plan [1,6].
TAV is enabled by RFID [1-4]. Current use of active and passive RFID provides visibility at portals to distribution centers and at transportation nodes. However, such usage fails to instrument movement between depots/distribution centers, ports of embarkation/debarkation, and theater-depots/distribution centers. For TAV to be successful, methods for visualizing the movement of material throughout the entire deployment must be used (eg, an ITV technology such as RFID). Such technologies provide identification information coupled with location and security/integrity information. Under this environment, TAV communications are optimized to use a combination of satellites and local cellular networks.
An additional method that will aid in optimizing the DOD Supply Chain and that provides a means for incorporating TAV into the existing logistics scheme is referred to as a nested structure (Figure 2) of sensors and supply-chain manifests to enable complete visualization of all segments of the DOD supply chain [5]. Such an integration/incorporation requires seamless compatibility with the existing information infrastructure.
The pages ahead will discuss how technologies such as GPS and global wireless communications can be deployed throughout the DOD supply chain to ensure Total Asset Visibility-a visibility that is essential to improving management and security of the...