Advantages Of RFID Technology

RFID technology started to gain prominence in the early 70s due to its significant advantages compared with the barcode system which is limited to the requirement of line-of-sight reading. However, the concept of RFID dates back to World War II as the British Air Force used radar to distinguish Allied aircraft from the enemy planes. RFID-enabled applications have grown at a tremendous rate with system deployments in a number of industries such as pharmaceuticals, health care, transportation, retail, defence, and logistics. RFID offers strategic advantages for businesses because it can track inventory in the supply chain more efficiently, provide real-time in-transit visibility (ITV), and monitor general enterprise assets. The involvement of

The tag consists of a microcontroller, a wired or printed antenna, and polymer-encapsulating material that wraps around the antenna and the chip. Readers interrogate tags for their contents through their RF antenna and interface to back-end databases for more functionalities [2]. Although incorporating RFID technology into existing systems is more favourable, however, the behaviour of tagged items and the environment where the system is installed must be taken into account as it will have a major influence [3]. RFID technology offers fantastic potential in the field of tracking and monitoring especially for supply chain in industries and manufacturing process. This has been further clarified with the system proposed in [2]. RFID tracking system has also been discussed in vehicle tracking by considering the issues in traffic signals, congestions and theft [4]. Real time location tracking using RFID has been proposed to help reduce diversion of transit goods and this has been discussed further in [5]. An RFID-based bracelet has been invented by researchers from Al Akhawayn University, Morocco primarily to track airport luggages and an interface system that includes passenger and flight management systems

The proposed system has been developed using RFID, GPRS, GPS and GIS where the former three constitutes into 1 system which will be installed inside the bus. The RFID tag is deployed in the bus station. As the bus approaches a bus station which is equipped with a RFID tag, the retrieved data from the tag is sent to the monitoring centre via GPRS. Internet availability is crucial in order for the data to be transmitted through GPRS. The system boast high efficiency and reliability. However, the system would require a high maintenance cost due to its usage of multiple sensing technology. A cost saving online bus information system which adopts RFID and Zigbee has been introduced in [11]. The proposed research emphasizes on recording the information on the buses and drivers and is both low cost and requires less maintenance due to its minimum usage of hardware and software components. A few studies have incorporated RFID technology and have integrated communication technologies in vehicle management systems (VMSs) [13, 14]. Wang et al. [15] integrated RFID with a GIS and the GPS with Visual Basic.Net and Visual Earth as the software platform to build a real-time VMS. A mobile RFID system was also realized to ensure the safety of the vehicles, in which RFID technology was embedded with Web-GIS