The increasing number of product references involved in production and distribution lines, implies an added complexity for the management and control systems of companies. Moreover, customers are increasingly in favour of the use of new technology when placing their orders, such as on-line booking and purchasing, and their requirements are increasingly greater. Customers, as well as companies, are demanding updated information on the condition and location of their ordered products during fabrication and transportation phases. This paper proposes an analysis of the applicability of accessing information in real-time related to a product's condition along the manufacturing and supply chain, by means of the integration of RFID systems with sensors and wireless networks. To achieve this purpose a multi-service controller board has been designed into which specific operation modules are plugged. The modules are active or passive RFID readers, modules with sensors or actuators, or modules for data storage. Furthermore, some other communication modules have also been developed offering WLAN, ZigBee or GPRS networks. Using these solutions, companies will have a more reliable and faster access to information in different areas of manufacturing and logistics. Their ease of implantation and reliability makes the use of the systems analysed here, an ideal solution for companies who wish to monitor over their manufacturing and distribution lines more easily. In addition, when all this technology works together, new functions and applications appear with interesting results for the different case studies.
In this paper we introduce an UHF-RFID reader system built to serve as a multi-purpose reader for UHF-RFID applications. The structure of the reader itself is highly flexible to be able to include several standards. The intended use of the reader, however, consists in the support of navigation systems for the indoor environment. Assuming that arbitrarily distributed RFID tags, containing their exact positions given in latitude, longitude and elevation, are read out by the reader, the system is able to achieve the tags positions. In that case, the reader is able to evaluate and forward the readout positions in order to notify a superior navigation system of the estimated position, obtained from the RFID tags. This will lead to a more robust navigation system being able to navigate even in a high-grade multipath environment. Anyway, this paper concentrates more on technical terms concerning the reader system, including signal and spectrum analysis
This paper offers an RFID-based indoor navigation application which utilizes cell phones with an RFID extension and distributed RFID tags fixed to interior equipment. This combination creates a special navigation environment which helps pedestrians to orient oneself in new respectively unknown environments. Therefore, each RFID tag contains information about the current position, location or an unknown environment. Thus, the current position can be determined, which is the basic for navigation. A further advantage of this application is the availability of additional graphical data stored on the RFID tags. This additional graphical data contains global information about the indoor environment and also local graphical information about the near environment of the RFID tag. This yields to an RFID-based navigation system, that not only shows the current position but also the near environment surrounding that specific location. Therefore, this systems grants navigation assi stance by leading the user step-by-step or rather tag-by-tag to the final destination
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