Road construction material identification Toxic waste monitoring Vehicle parking monitoring Valuable objects insurance identification Gas bottle inventory control Asset management Stolen vehicle identification Production line monitoring Car body production Parts identification Barrel stock control Machine tool management This list represents a sample of possible applications; others emerge daily. One of the most intriguing new areas for RFID deployment lies within the realm of homeland security. There are clearly traditional applications for RFID-IFF, access control, package handling and Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Access Technologies Chapter 6 identification, fire control, personnel movement, and production man- agement-under the purview of defense and homeland security that are well understood and fully deployed. A new area that is enjoying a great deal of scrutiny today, however, is port security. Large ports are vulnera- ble environments because of the number of ships that come and go, and the far larger number of containers that enter the port system every hour of every day-over 90 percent of the world's volume of shipped goods travel by ship. Until recently it has been next-to-impossible to examine every inbound container because of sheer volumes: Long Beach, shown in Figure 6-14, handles the equivalent of 11 million containers a year, while Singapore and Hong Kong-arguably the largest roll-on, roll- off (RO-RO) ports in the world in terms of container volume-each move approximately 15 million units annually. Shipboard container doors are closed and locked before the vessel leaves port. The doors are then sealed with antitamper protection to ensure that if they are opened in transit, the seal is broken and the fact that the container was opened will be evident to authorities upon inspec- tion at the destination port