Press Report

Finding out possibilities and limits of RFID technology within cross-company shipment tracking

(Dispo 06.2006) As today´s transport chains in the industry always become more and more complex and international new solutions are required which allow for the precise and real-time shipment tracking. For this purpose it is necessary apart from the use of suitable, high-performance recording technologies for shipping and transaction data to implement a uniform platform for the collection, administration and editing of transport data. This fundamental insight was the starting point for a one-year pilot project which was concluded by mid-November 2005 and which the Austrian software house inet-logistics carried out together with the Vorarlberg Institute VResearch and the international logistics company Gebrüder Weiss.

The pilot project was inspired by the rising establishment of RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification)-technology which until then had primarily been used for internal goods flow and logistics processes. In the course of the pilot project RFID-technology was used for various tasks as regards the recording of shipments and their statuses and it was examined in the face of its fitness for use. Apart from the identification of shipments and/or objects RFID was used and examined together with sensor technology, as decentralised information memory as well as in combination with hand-held reading devices. The pilot project resulted in several concrete products which get market by inet-logistics under the name Shipment Localisation Kit: in short: SLK. The RFID-modules with tracking components which were used in the pilot project initially had prototype status but were further developed until they were ready for the market. Furthermore the product requirements were defined in the project and consequently they entered in the product development.

The first follow-up project to the RFID pilot project is already in process. This project aims at the continuous shipment tracking of building material transports. Apart from the tracking it is also highly important to ensure a constant temperature level during the transport.