When transporting or storing chemicals or other hazardous materials, certain storage regulations need to be observed to avoid incidents that could cause damage to humans or the environment. In principle, wireless sensor networks can be used to implement a fully automatic monitoring of all storage regulations. However, for the introduction of the technology into real-world applications, some practical problems have to be solved first. Making local decisions within an intelligent network offers many operational benefits, but it also complicates the management and the supervision of the whole system. A service-oriented approach is one possible solution: Business logic is defined in the form of services that can be deployed to individual sensor nodes based on the specific application requirements.
