Radio Frequency Identification Deployment Research Articles

Efficient Tag Grouping RFID Anti-Collision Algorithm for Internet of Things Applications Based on Improved K-Means Clustering

Dynamic Frame Slotted ALOHA (DFSA) is a de facto algorithm in the EPC Global Class-1 Generation-2 protocol for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag collision problem. DFSA fails when the UHF RFID tag deployment becomes dense like in Internet of Things (IoT). Existing works do not provide readers prior tag estimates. Most algorithms assume a collision slot means two tag collision. But in dense IoT applications, much more than two tags can constitute a collision slot. Moreover, research proves collision slot might occur due to other reasons such as error-prone channel. This paper proposes a RFID anti-collision algorithm, kg-DFSA that equips the reader with prior information on accurate tag estimate. In kg-DFSA, tag identification is divided into two stages – initialization and identification. In the initialization stage, the reader uses improved K-means clustering running concurrently with a tag counter algorithm to cluster tags into K groups using tags’ RN16 while the counter returns an accurate tag number estimate. In the identification stage, the tags are read only in frame chunks that match their group IDs while a new frame size look up table is developed to boost efficiency. Variants of the proposed kg-DFSA, traditional DFSA and another grouping based DFSA algorithm (FCM-DFSA) were implemented in MATLAB. Extensive Monte Carlo simulation shows the proposed kg-DFSA edges DFSA in terms of success rate 50%, system efficiency 65% and identification time 28%. The proposed model is useful in enhancing the existing MAC protocol to support dense IoT deployment of RFID.

Understanding the RFID Deployment at Sacred Heart Medical Center: Using Technology-Organization-Environment Framework Lenses

This qualitative study based on a single case features the radio frequency identification (RFID)-based real-time location system (RTLS) system to track intravenous (IV) pumps deployed by the Sacred Heart Medical Center (SHMC), Eugene, Oregon --- one unit of the PeaceHealth network based in western U.S.A. Asset tracking management, followed by the tracking of medical staff and patients continue to be leading applications for RFID in the healthcare industry in north America. This case study uses Tornatzky’s technology-organization-environment framework in interpreting and understanding the RFID deployment at SHMC/Eugene, Oregon.

FTSMAC: A Multi-Channel Hybrid Reader Collision Avoidance Protocol for RFID Network

Due to the emergence of the Internet of Things, the need for effective identification and traceability has increased. Radio-frequency identification (RFID), a simple and cheap approach for gathering information, has therefore drawn the attention of research communities. However, this system suffers from problems caused by high density, such as collisions and duplication. Thus, the deployment of RFID is more effective in a dense environment where it may improve overage and delays. A wide range of solutions have been proposed; however, the majority of these are based on the application context. In this paper, we propose a general MAC layer protocol FTSMAC (Frequency Time Scheme MAC) in which the spectrum frequency is efficiently used by dividing the signal into different time slots via a messaging mechanism used by RFID readers. This limits the collisions in high-density RFID deployment that affect the performance of the system. Thus, our solution allows the communication system to converge to a stable state within a convenient time.

Equilibrium strategies of channel structure and RFID technology deployment in a supply chain with manufacturer encroachment

The rapid growth of online marketplaces and the advance of Internet technology have enabled manufacturers to more easily engage in direct selling through their own online stores. However, as any retail channel suffers misplacements, the manufacturer's direct sales channel will also face a critical inventory misplacement problem if it chooses encroachment. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) proven to be the most effective technology to eliminate the inventory misplacement problem. This paper investigates the strategic interaction between manufacturer encroachment and RFID deployment decisions in a supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a reseller. We find that the manufacturers’ encroachment strategies are determined by channels’ misplacement rates, RFID deployment decisions and channel competition intensity. Specifically, the retail (direct) channel's misplacement problem encourages (discourages) the manufacturer to encroach; in addition, if only the retail (if it is direct) channel employs RFID, the encroachment cost threshold increases (decreases) with the RFID tag price; moreover, the more intense the channel competition is, the less likely the manufacturer will be to encroach. Further, when encroachment has occurred, channel competition will be a crucial factor in the direct channel's RFID deployment decision, but it will not affect the deployment of RFID in the retail channel.

Advances in the Design Techniques and Applications of Chipless RFIDs

The recent emergence of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) applications have attracted the attention of all the stakeholders, namely developers, manufacturers, and end-users. In essence, RFID has permeated the broad spectrum of item tracking, identification, and sensing. Alternatively, it is safe to say that RFID has revolutionized item tracking, sensing, and monitoring mechanisms. However, RFID's proliferation often faces a roadblock due to its associated cost due to silicon-based integrated circuits. This aspect can be addressed by the emerging design techniques and performance enhancement approach adopted for the realization of Chipless RFIDs. This has catapulted the Chipless RFIDs at the forefront in recent years. The chipless RFID tag uses electromagnetic properties to store the information and eliminate memory chips. It is anticipated that the usage of Chipless RFIDs will increase by leaps and bounds in the coming years. Therefore, this paper discusses some of the critical applications that can be directly served by Chipless RFIDs. This paper also elaborates on the associated constraints which limit the mass deployment of the Chipless RFIDs. Furthermore, this paper throws some light on some of the exciting research directions for future development.

Development and Integration of RFID Simulation Based Tool for Improved Schedule Performance in Saudi Arabia Precast Concrete Industry

A construction project is measured as a process that encompasses numerous activities and a huge amount of information of numerous types that are related to each other. Effective project management entails controlling all aspects of a construction project: quality and quantity of work, costs, and schedules to guarantee the accomplishment of the project. The construction industry in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is implementing off-site construction with precast cement, for its higher quality, short cycle time, and negligible environmental influence. Amongst the various off-site construction approaches, such construction follows a manufacturing method where houses are built in smaller panels in an assembly line. Owing to the complex and exclusive nature of the home building process, prevailing manufacturing concepts such as automated production planning and control system are not applicable to the panelized home production facility. This research aims in the development and integration of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to for production planning and control system, resulting in improved schedule performance, in Saudi Arabia precast concrete industry. Radio frequency identification is appropriate to numerous construction applications and generates cost savings via increased speed and accuracy of data entry. The study provides a set of helpful protocols for the deployment of passive RFIDs for automated on factory management of precast concrete operations. Further it aims at paving the way for managing the site for the sake of attaining the desired goals considering the guarantee of achieving high quality and quick conveyance to the related sites which, hence, prompts auspicious conveyance of development ventures. The study is beneficial for the construction professionals to assess the prevailing construction quality perception and the expectations from implementation of any quality improvement technique in construction projects.

Optimal RFID Deployment in a Multiple-Stage Production System Under Inventory Inaccuracy and Robust Control Policy

Deploying radio frequency identification (RFID) devices or applying robust production control policy can both reduce the negative impact of inventory inaccuracy. In this paper, we investigate the problem of optimally deploying RFID devices in a multistage production system with inventory inaccuracy and robust control policy. We first model the multiple-stage production system as a Markov decision process model, in which the decision of deploying RFID devices is included. After that, an integer programming model is constructed for optimally deploying RFID device problem. Meanwhile, we propose a robust production control strategy by employing the policy iteration and the decomposition/coordination techniques, and a heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve the integer programming model. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to examine the performance of the proposed optimal RFID deployment approach. We discover that when RFID is deployed at a certain workstation (i.e., production equipment), the benefits of deploying RFID devices can transfer to the upstream and downstream stages (i.e., reduce the production cost of both upstream and downstream stages). Furthermore, numerical experiments reveal that the deploying RFID devices evenly among all the stages of the production system will generate a better performance.

A passive RFID-based location system for personnel and asset monitoring.

Typical radio frequency identification (RFID) access control system can be ineffective if an unauthorized person tailgates an authorized person through an access area. To propose a system by using indoor locating and tracking techniques address this problem, which is to prevent unauthorized Alzheimer's and dementia patients from getting lost including by tailgating. To achieve accurate target location, passive RFID deployment strategy is studied and a fingerprinting based passive RFID localization algorithm is proposed. The proposed system was evaluated in a building environment to simulate the performance of access control. RFID reader was installed on ceiling near the access area and tags were stitched on both shoulders of the experiment subject's garments. The probability of the error distance within 0.3 m achieved 97% in the warning area; the location precision achieved 97% within 0.4 m in the monitoring area. The result showed that if an unauthorized person enters the restricted area, the system can initiate an alert signal accurately. Therefore, the proposed system is very suitable to be used in nursing home or hospital to prevent unauthorized personnel and assets entering/exiting a confined location.

Radio Frequency Identification: Opportunities and Challenges

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has fundamental influences on today’s retailing and supply chain management. This paper seeks to formulate the opportunities and challenges of RFID adoption in India. The paper provides insights on RFID technology, its benefits and challenges in full adoption of RFID in the Indian perspective. Although Indian companies are exposed to several challenges in the adoption of RFID, there are numerous opportunities for RFID deployment. Challenges include India’s standards, costs, business environment, business models, and untested market. The opportunities include India’s huge market size, advances of several industries, a rapid increase in logistics demand, and India’s role as a world-class manufacturing center. Opportunities and challenges of RFID adoption in India were identified, which provide valuable guidance for RFID adoption for Indian companies and foreign companies operating in India.

Assessing the Performance of a Novel Tag-based Reader-to-Reader Communication Paradigm under Noisy Channel Conditions

The widespread deployment of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers paved the way for research activities focused on applications that go well beyond the mere identification of people and goods. In this context, the paper investigates an innovative paradigm, according to which the residual data storage capacity of passive RFID tags is used as a kind of “virtual” communication channel to exchange data in RFID ecosystems of the Internet of Things (IoT). The performance of the paradigm is assessed through the evaluation of a number of important communication parameters, such as goodput and delay. The analytical study, validated through simulations, evaluates the impact that the following key parameters have on the system performance: 1) radio channel errors; 2) collisions; 3) number of involved readers; 4) memory block reading size under noisy channel conditions; and 5) heterogeneous storage capacity of available tags. This allows obtaining design directives for a well-performing implementation of the proposed communication paradigm. In particular, accounting for the negative effects of channel errors on the system goodput, in this paper, we highlight the relationship between optimal memory reading block size and channel errors to maximize the communication performance.

Strategic values of technology-driven innovation in inventory management: a case study of Zara's RFID implementation

Inventory management has always been at the top of the agenda in the fast fashion business. Companies compete largely on strategic inventory management, which empowers quick market responsiveness. Much interest has recently been aroused by the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) in enabling product visibility along the supply chain. This paper presents a case study of Zara's RFID deployment, one of the largest-scale implementations in the industry, based on secondary data. It explores how Zara's RFID adoption aligns with its existing supply chain structure, business model and IT infrastructure. By drawing on the IT value hierarchy model (Urwiler and Frolick, 2008) in information systems literature, this paper creates a showcase for technology-enabled innovation that brings competitive differentiation in the context of inventory management in the fast fashion industry.

An Integrated Conceptual Framework for RFID Enabled Healthcare

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is a wireless communication technology that facilitates automatic identification and data capture without human intervention. Since 2000s, RFID applications in the health care industry are increasing. RFID has brought many improvements in areas like patient care, patient safety, equipment tracking, resource utilization, processing time reduction and so on. On the other hand, often deployment of RFID is questioned on the issues like high capital investment, technological complexity, and privacy concerns. Exploration of existing literature indicates the presence of works on the topics like asset management, patient management, staff management, institutional advantages, and organizational issues. However, most of the works are focused on a particular issue. Still now, scholarly attempts to integrate all the facades of RFID-enabled healthcare are limited. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework that represents the scope for implementation of this technology and the various dimensions of RFID-enabled healthcare and demonstrate them in detail. Also, we have discussed the critical issues that can prove to be potential barriers to its successful implementation and current approaches to resolving these. We also discuss some of the regulatory initiatives encouraging its adoption in the healthcare industry. Also, we have highlighted the future research opportunities in this domain.

Cost Effective Design of an RFID Based Healthcare Service System

Healthcare industry confronts many challenges in a pursuit to give safe, cost-effective and highly-valued healthcare services; Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is considered as one of the rising mechanism which helps in addressing the challenges, currently faced by Mobile Healthcare Service System (MHS). This article focuses on the contribution of cost-effective RFID deployments in healthcare sector that broadly categorize tracking of items, patients and items associated to patient; providing solutions for improving the auditability and accountability, reducing human errors, eliminating the risks of misidentification, identifying treatment errors and keeping the inventory updated. It explores certain parameters that can play an important role for the cost effective deployment of an RFID system such as security and privacy concerns, social and ethical aspects. Moreover, the article analyses the main challenges faced and investigates how security threats and vulnerabilities are a red flag to RFID technology. Furthermore, different solutions are highlighted that can streamline the operation and can optimize the workflow services in healthcare system. RFID represents next-generation enhancement over bar-code technology. Based on performance evaluation and comparison, differences between the two technologies are identified. This article also provides an overview that how RFID is a key enabler to build-up the healthcare service system and an efficacious affirm in optimizing and transforming healthcare practices.

Enhancing customer lifetime value in fast fashion retailing with RFID initiatives

Fast fashion retailers can achieve superior shop floor performance through deployment of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags at item level. Some of the key benefits of RFID adoption are reduced stock out, reduced labour cost, reduced inventory cost, enhanced visibility, and increased customer satisfaction. This paper aims to examine how fast fashion retailers can adopt RFID to achieve overall business excellence through value added-customer centric approach. The paper gives a better understanding of potential benefits of RFID deployment for fast fashion retailers in terms of enhanced customer lifetime value (CLV). This paper offers a conceptual framework for identifying business value added for a fast fashion retailer upon the RFID deployment and formulates a list of propositions, which form the broad basis of an empirical research agenda. The paper provides a case study of RFID deployment by fast fashion retailer and highlights new directions for further research.

Cooperative artificial bee colony algorithm for multi-objective RFID network planning

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is rapidly growing into an important technology for object identification and tracking applications. This gives rise to the most challenging RFID network planning (RNP) problem in the large-scale RFID deployment environment. RNP has been proven to be an NP-hard problem that involves many objectives and constraints. The application of evolutionary and swarm intelligence algorithms for solving multi-objective RNP (MORNP) has gained significant attention in the literature, while these proposed methods always transform multi-objective RNP into single-objective problem by the weighted coefficient approach. In this work, we propose a cooperative multi-objective artificial colony algorithm called CMOABC to find all the Pareto optimal solutions and to achieve the optimal planning solutions by simultaneously optimizing four conflicting objectives in MORNP. The experiment presents an exhaustive comparison of the proposed CMOABC and two successful multi-objective techniques, namely the recently developed multi-objective artificial bee colony algorithm (MOABC) and nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II), on instances of different nature, namely the two-objective and three-objective MORNP in the large-scale RFID scenario. Simulation results show that CMOABC proves to be superior for planning RFID networks compared to NSGA-II and MOABC in terms of optimization accuracy and computation robustness.

Effect of RFID on Organizational Performance: The Mediating Role of Supply Chain Performance

The aim of this paper is to examine the influence of radio frequency identification (RFID) deployment on firms manufacturing effectiveness and efficiency, and ultimately its impact on organizational performance via supply chain performance. The data was collected from 104 middle level and front-line managerial employees of three organizations. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique was used to analyze the data in order to test the hypotheses. Findings point out that deployment of RFID leads toward enhanced manufacturing effectiveness and efficiency, enhancement in effectiveness lead the organization toward better supply chain. Findings suggest that firms can adopt RFID technology to boost up their performance in terms of manufacturing effectiveness and efficiency and supply.

RPDM: A system for RFID probabilistic data management

Data streams are more and more commonly generated in a large number of scenarios by audio and video devices, Global Positioning System (GPS), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and other types of sensors. In particular, RFID technology has recently gained significant popularity, especially for real-time people and goods tracking, however the noisy, redundant and unreliable nature of RFID streams, coupled with their huge size, can make their exploitation and management difficult.In this paper, we present a realtime system for RFID Probabilistic Data Management (RPDM). The system manages unreliable and noisy raw RFID data and transforms them into reliable meaningful probabilistic data streams by means of a newly proposed method based on a probabilistic Hidden Markov Model (HMM). Moreover, to handle the huge data volume generated by RFID deployments, RPDM proposes and implements a simple on-line summarization mechanism, which is able to provide small space representation for the massive RFID probabilistic data streams while preserving the meaningful information. The results are promptly stored in a probabilistic database, in such a way that a wide range of probabilistic queries can be submitted and answered effectively. The experimental evaluation proves the feasibility of the approach in real-world object tracking scenarios.

Unveiling the RFID business: a survey of the Finnish RFID sector

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has been employed in several industrial domains in closed systems, but wide-scale adoption has yet to be achieved. A significant share of RFID deployments is related to access control and payment solutions, although industrial RFID applications (e.g. tracking and product identification) are also gaining ground. At European level, Finnish companies have been at the forefront of RFID adoption. This paper analyses the current state of the Finnish RFID sector, including the business models of RFID providers, the most important customer segments, and the challenges perceived in the providers’ operational environment. Consequently, it should be possible to predict the development of the RFID sector in Europe in the near future.

Investigating the role of task-technology fit along with attractiveness of alternative technology to utilize RFID system in the organization

In spite of exponential growth projections of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) market value, many companies are reluctant to adopt RFID and RFID vendors are complaining that the business is not growing as fast as expected. The existing challenges and deep skepticism that RFID is facing remains around the return on investment, the incompleteness of RFID technology, and the lack of trust in the result of performance improvement. To fill these voids identified in previous research, from the perspective of business productivity and efficiency, this paper investigates what factors affect RFID-driven task performance, based on the extended Task-Technology Fit (TTF) model. To empirically evaluate the proposed model, a total of 63 usable responses were collected from companies in Korea, and the data is analyzed by Partial Least Squares (PLS). The results obtained pointed out the importance of the fit between the technology and users’ tasks in achieving individual performance impact. Moreover, negative perceptions toward RFID have no direct effect on continuing RFID utilization. Knowing these factors, potential technology users are able to evaluate if it is reasonable to adopt RFID under certain conditions and at a certain point in time. Furthermore, they can attempt to actively influence these variables in order to reduce the failure probability of RFID deployments.

Design and Evaluation of RFID Deployments in a Trauma Resuscitation Bay

We examined configuring a radio frequency identification (RFID) equipment for the best object use detection in a trauma bay. Unlike prior work on RFID, we 1) optimized the accuracy of object use detection rather than just object detection; and 2) quantitatively assessed antenna placement while addressing issues specific to tag placement likely to occur in a trauma bay. Our design started with an analysis of the environment requirements and constraints. We designed several antenna setups with different number of components (RFID tags or antennas) and their orientations. Setups were evaluated under scenarios simulating a dynamic medical setting. We used three metrics with increasing complexity and bias: read rate, received signal strength indication distribution distance, and target application performance. Our experiments showed that antennas above the regions with high object density are most suitable for detecting object use. We explored tagging strategies for challenging objects so that sufficient readout rates are obtained for computing evaluation metrics. Among the metrics, distribution distance was correlated with target application performance, and also less biased and simpler to calculate, which made it an excellent metric for context-aware applications. We present experimental results obtained in the real trauma bay to validate our findings.