Lane Risk Analysis

We do a risk based assessment of lanes to quantify the potential failure rate for shippers used on these lanes.

For a risk based analysis we use a database of historic temperature data to generate ambient temperature profiles for an arbitrary lane. The huge database covers temperature records of several years and more than 20.000 weather stations worldwide. We run a large number of temperature profiles on a predefined shipper to get information about the statistical risk of the shipper on this lane.  We also investigate the influence of various insulations and the initial temperature of coolants. The risk based approach can be used to establish new shipping lanes, determine the best fitting passive shipper for that purpose. The approach can also be consulted to “qualify lanes” and identifying the major risks of your cool chain process. Further it is feasible to use the virtual risk based approach to identify problems in the process chain and adjust it accordingly.

Figure 1: Risk based analysis. (a) Each line represents a historical ambient temperature profile of 72hr duration (at one location). (b) Explosion sketch of a shipper. (c) Simulated temperature read out of the shipper when exposed to the set of ambient temperature profiles in (a). Gray lines – Specification of shipper temperature (between 2°C and 8°C, horizontal lines) and lifetime (48hr, vertical line); red lines – shipper failed its specifications; green lines – shipper passed its specifications.

Figure 2: Statistical evaluation of thermal behaviour of the shipper. (a) Histogram of time when shipper fails for the temperature profiles shown in Figure 1a. Red line indicates 48 hours. (b) Cumulative distribution function (CDF) of shipper failure, where marks the percentage of failed shippers.