The British Airport Authority is testingradio frequency identification (RFID)technology at Heathrow Airport to see if baggage tags can
be read with fewer mistakes than ones with barcodes.
"Moving from variable rate of success, in terms of
reading the barcode, to a very high rate of success - that's
the hypothesis that we're testing at Heathrow," said Stephen
Challis, Head of Product Development at BAA Heathrow.
BAA's £150,000
trial lasts six months and will deal with over 300,000 pieces
of baggage. The results of the trial could provide an incentive for
airlines at Heathrow to adopt the RFID system that BAA will use to
manage its part of the baggage handling process.
But according to a 2007 report by the
International Air Transport
Association (Iata) which surveyed 361 airlines, opinions remain
divided about whether investing in RFID technology is
worthwhile.
The report said that while half the airlines thought that RFID
would offer real benefits, other airlines argue that it doesn't
offer a return on investment and that the cost of installing RFID
technology is too high.
Iata identified the varying cost of printing RFID labels and
readers as an area of concern. It asked RFID label suppliers for
their price list and found that for 10 million labels the cost was
approximately $0.063 and for one million labels this rose to
$0.125.
But with 100,000 labels the cost jumped to nearly $0.188, which
might make RFID expensive for smaller airlines. Existing barcode
printers may also need modification to print RFID tags and this
cost should be borne in mind by airline operators, said Iata.
Currently, if a barcode tag isn't printed properly or it gets
wet or crumpled, it cannot be read by lasers in the baggage system.
This requires a baggage handler to manually determine where the
misread luggage should go and is something BAA wants to reduce.
RFID overcomes this problem because it does not require the tag to
be in the line of sight of the reader.
But according to Iata, barcode reading problems are only
responsible for causing 9.7% of all mishandled baggage at airlines.
The main reason for baggage mishandling is the late arrival of
flights (e.g. caused by bad weather), where a passenger had a
transfer to catch (30.1%).
To truly reap benefits from RFID, the IATA analysis of baggage
mishandling showed that 80 airports would need to be equipped with
RFID.
Andrew Price, Project Manager RFID at Iata, said that the global
interoperability of RFID tags could be a challenge in airlines
because they transmit on slightly different frequencies and can be
read with varying sensitivity.
“That makes it difficult to home-in on what exactly you’re reading.
That’s the challenge in baggage handling,” he said.
However at the beginning of February 2008, GS1, the European
Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the European
Committee for Standardisation (CEN) three major standards
organisations, launched the Global RFID Interoperability Forum for
Standards (GRIFS), a support action project funded by the European
Union. Its aim is to improve collaboration and maximise the global
interoperability of RFID standards.
David Bicknell's RFID blog >>