The present invention relates to a method of managing freight information for performing freight transportation from a consignor to a consignee and a freight management system and more particularly, to a freight information management method and a freight management system which use a contactless information readable IC card as an electronic tag and have many freight loading/unloading base stations so as to be suitable for wide area transport requiring quick and accurate transportation.
In mixed freight transportation services for transport of mixed freight goods of many consignors, as represented by door to door delivery, freight goods are transported from a consignor to a consignee through many stages of base stations. Under the circumstances, with a view to improving the quality of transport service including prevention of irregular conditions such as loss of freight, misunderstood delivery destination and damage, the freight pursuit intending to precisely catch the pass history of freight at each base station is of significant importance.
At the present-day practical level, a system using a bar code has been used widely as a means for realizing the freight pursuit. In the bar code system, the freight pursuit is carried out by printing a bar code indicative of a freight number on a freight slip and reading the bar code on the slip attached to the freight at each pass base station. But, in the bar code system, it is necessary for reading the bar code to align the direction of the freight goods and to scan for read of information freight by freight. Further, technical restrictions are encountered in which only initially registered information can be held or the capacity of information which can be held is small. Consequently, acquisition work of freight pass information is laborious and time-consuming, raising a problem that perfect automation of freight control such as sorting is difficult to achieve without resort to manual labor. Further, owing to these problems, there arises other fatal problems from the standpoint of freight pursuit that a time lag occurs between acquired freight history information and actual freight transit or items in the freight history information are insufficient.
To solve these problems, a freight information management method has been studied recently, according to which an electronic freight slip (electronic tag) utilizing an IC card capable of storing a great amount of information and writing and reading information in a contactless fashion is used in place of the freight slip printed with a bar code. Such a technique as above is described in, for example, JP-A-4-341414. In the literature, when delivery information is stored in an electronic tag in response to an inquiry signal from an electronic reader/writer installed in a truck in a navigation system using the electronic tag and adapted to transmit stored delivery information, the position information of a delivery destination is inputted on longitude and latitude corresponding to GPS information. On the other hand, the truck detects its vehicle position by means of a GPS (Global Positioning System) to display its present position in the form of a present position indication mark on a navigation map displayed on an indicator of a navigation unit and at the same time, displays on the navigation map, as delivery destination, position information of the delivery destination contained in the delivery information read out of the electronic tag and inputted to the navigation unit. According to JP-A-4-341414 as above, even an unexperienced door to door delivery worker can set a delivery route as exactly as an experienced worker does and delivery miss and missing delivery can be prevented.