ETFA2009 presentation - RFID tuning methodology applied on airport baggage tracking

 

RFID tuning methodology

applied on airport baggage tracking

 

Carlos Jacinto, Mário Romano Ana Montes, Pedro Sousa Link, Av. Duque Ávila 23, 1000 Lisboa carlos.jacinto@link.pt, mario.romano@link.pt ana.montes@link.pt, pedro.sousa@link.pt

Mário Serafim Nunes Instituto Superior Técnico Rua Alves Redol, 1000 Lisboa mario.nunes@ist.utl.pt

 

From Setember 22 to 26 link will be present at the international conference ETFA’2009 - Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation, in Maiorca, Spain. The ETFA conference series is the prime, and largest, IEEE event dedicated to factory automation and emerging technologies in industrial automation. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners from the industry and academia and provide them with a platform to report on recent advances and developments in the newly emerging areas of technology, as well as actual and potential applications to industrial and factory automation.

 

Figure 1 – Flight Baggage Dashboard

Under the theme “RFID tuning methodology applied on airport baggage tracking”, I will present results taken from the Project “Dumbo” (“Demonstrador Universal de Monitorização de Bagagens e Operações” – “Operations and Baggage Monitoring Universal Demonstrator”). This project uses RFID technology to monitor in real-time baggage and operations between airports, airliners and ground operators, allowing the assessment of the SLAs (Service Level Agreements) agreed upon the intervenient players.

Figure 2 – Service Level Agreements

The project has an end-to-end travel perspective over 3 airports: at the departure airport, monitoring RFID equipment is used from check-in desks along pre-defined baggage circuits up to the airplane cargo entrance; at the arrival airport, RFID equipment is used from airplane cargo doors up to customs exit.

This paper presents an RFID equipment tuning and configuration methodology developed during the project. The lack of adequate tooling on the market presented the opportunity to build the tool used to select the best solutions and to collect the information presented on this paper.

Figure 3 – RFIDAntennaTuner output

Figure 4 – RSSI for different power combinations

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