The Hindu Business Line : Tagging smartness to systems

RFID will improve service considerably in terms of reduction in mishandled baggage and new security requirements, and increase speeds in sorting and scanning systems.

The British army urgently needed tank tracks for operations in Iraq: the world's largest air cargo plane was to be hired for transporting the equipment from the UK.

Relying on automatic scanning through RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) systems, the logistics team found tank tracks already in theatre, thus saving the cost of leasing the aircraft for an expedited delivery.

A similar instance is described by a top US air force commander involved in the Iraq war: "(Back) in Desert Storm, we had mountains of containers that never got opened ... that's not happening this time."

RFID is rumoured to have `saved' a few US soldiers in Basra from `starvation' when they got stuck in a huge sandstorm amidst intermittent gunfire. They used RFID readers to locate a container with Cheerios and milk!

Andrew Burrows, principal consultant in the Unisys Global Transportation Group, explains that during the first Gulf War, US forces realised they were not keeping adequate track of munitions, medical items, and other supplies.

The system devised by Unisys put an RFID tag on each container and, for important supplies - ammunition and blood plasma — even a tag on each item. The system uses powerful (and expensive) active tags that enable the containers to be tracked by satellite, giving the military commanders a complete picture of what supplies they have anywhere in the world, including in the pipeline — by air, sea or land.

Taking off in air travel space

Early users of the technology included the US railroads to determine the location of their railcars. General Motors has used RFID tags since 1984 to track parts and assemblies through its production processes. The largest RFID implementation has been the US military's Total Asset Visibility network. The technology is currently being used in the US also for electronic highway toll collection.

The IATA (International Air Transport Association) has endorsed RFID as one of the five technologies that promise to reduce airline costs. The US Transportation Security Administration estimates that the US airline industry will have to spend about $5 billion over the next 5-10 years to upgrade baggage screening systems to comply with the post-9/11 laws.

RFID will improve service considerably in terms of reduction in mishandled baggage and new security requirements; increase speeds in sorting and scanning systems; reduce baggage tag read errors; lower scanner maintenance costs; and allow the ability to scan bags in a baggage container that cannot be scanned by an optical scanner.

Over 2.5 million passenger bags are reported misplaced each year, only by top US airlines, and this represents only 0.5 per cent of the total annual carriage. RFID will be useful for asset tracking of ULDs (Unit Load Devices) and premium cargo.

Other advantages

Several other advantages that may accrue would include: theft prevention of valuable air cargo by concealed RFID tags and surveillance of hazardous cargo. Worldwide, the direct cost of cargo theft exceeds $30 billion and $10 billion in the US alone.

Delta thinks RFID will transform the airline ramp as much as radar did to transform air traffic control. The San Francisco airport used RFID tags to identify the baggage of high-risk passengers so they can be screened using bomb-detection equipment. Hong Kong International Airport is deploying the largest RFID network.

As each item arrives at the luggage-handling conveyor, a machine will automatically stick a smart label to each piece of luggage, a bar code scanner will read the bag's bar-coded label, and the label's IATA number will be written on the bag's RFID tag.

Boeing and Airbus propose to extensively use RFID to help them manage inbound parts and supplies. Better tracking through RFID is estimated to save Airbus $400 million a year.

Passive tags are not a problem on aircraft, but active tags are. Each one has to be cleared by the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) for each different aircraft.

In an early 1990s trial, KLM and British Airways attached the tags to standard aircraft pallets, and captured their movements in the warehouse and on the ramp. These passive tags contain a tiny silicon chip attached to a wire loop. The tags are `read' when they pass through a magnetic field generated, for instance, at the entrance to a warehouse or a retail store. These passive tags can be read within a few metres of a reader. Active tags are larger and can be read from up to 200 metres away.

Cargo theft

Historically, cargo thefts represent one of the weakest links in the global supply chain. The US Department of Transportation's Intelligent Transportation System Project has been working on three intelligent transportation systems (ITS) inter-modal freight projects. The Electronic Seal project is designed to track container in-bound from the point of inspection to the destination of the container, through seaports and across land border crossings.

Online security system, the Yard BOSS, consists of a transmitter, a Base Station receiver, and a computer running the Security Server application. Yard BOSS ensures the door seal integrity and any movement of trailer; the Road Boss is a portable, external unit for monitoring trailers; the Mini BOSS can provide tracking data from inside shipping containers or cargo trailers.

To be concluded

(The author is former MD, Concor.)

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