New tagging tech may spell end of lost airport baggage
BY Agencies6 Jun 2018 5:45 PM GMT
Agencies6 Jun 2018 5:45 PM GMT
Parma (Italy): An Italian company has developed a new tagging technology that uses RFID chips to track luggage in real time at every stage of the transfer, an advance that may put an end to lost or delayed baggage which cost airlines billions of dollars each year and pose security risks.
According to a report by the aviation IT specialist, SITA, 5.73 bags per thousand passengers went astray in 2016. Recovering and returning lost bags cost the aviation industry USD 2.1 billion in 2016.
Using the technology, scanners on conveyor belts can scan the radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags attached to the bag and reroute them if they have been sent in the wrong direction, a vast improvement on barcode hand scanning, which has been the industry standard since the '90s.
The technology is already in use at the Hong Kong and the Las Vegas airports, according to Gabriele Ruggiere, Head of Aviation at Custom Group, the company which is supplying printers to over 300 airports in the world, including 16 in India.
Delta is the first airline to use RFID baggage tagging at a large scale, Ruggiere told PTI in an interview at their global headquarters here.
"The direct printing of RFID tags on the baggage tags allows tracing the suitcases during their whole path, reducing to the minimum the risk of loss or delay with the delivery, including security too," Ruggiere said.
The technology is embedded in the ticket printer that the company has developed. A special tagging paper with an RFID chip is used for the purpose.
The antenna in the printer reads and encodes the unique information in each tag, which is then used to trace the luggage at any stage of transfer.
RFID uses electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects. The tags contain electronically-stored information.
Passive tags collect energy from a nearby RFID reader's interrogating radio waves. Active tags have a local power source (such as a battery) and may operate hundreds of metres from the RFID
reader.
"First of all in an airport when you check in, you want your luggage tagged in a very short time. The tag is 50 centimeters long so if you use Custom printer it will be tagged in a second, while other printers take 5-6 seconds," Ruggiere said.
"With the changing technology, it is safer and more secure to use the RFID system as compared to the standard bar code," said Custom Group CEO and President Carlo Stradi.
"In aviation, the same luggage tag that you have is incorporated in a chip, so you have 100 per cent assurance that the chip will be readable," he said.
The new RFID tags look identical to the current luggage tags, but with the added benefit of improving luggage accuracy rate of up to 99.9 per cent.
"The International Air Transport Association (IATA), a trade association of the world's airlines, wants the airlines to save costs from mishandled luggage, which is costing a huge amount of money to them," said Ruggiere.
"It causes hassles for passengers because the luggage does not come on time, and it also means the airlines have to deliver them to the passenger's home.
"The cost to courier the luggage is in billions of dollars. So if they have a system in place they could save these costs," he said.
Ruggiere noted that when the luggage does not come within the stipulated time people think that the luggage has been lost, when actually it has not been scanned in time in the carousel or the tag was not printed properly.
"It is also possible that the tag was bent. So it goes in a separate line where the people are scanning manually. If it is not readable it can not be loaded in the flight and may come in the next flight or a day after," he said.
Unlike a barcode, the tag need not be within the line of sight of the reader, so it may be embedded in the tracked object.
"If you have RFID, the luggage can be located just by a click of a button. There are two airports which are using RFID massively, one is Hong Kong and the other is Las Vegas," said Ruggiere.
"However, the chip is costly. The first airline that decided to introduce RFID massively is Delta. The Custom has supplied RFID printers to Delta. They started to use of technology a year and a half ago," he said.
The RFID technology has found a rapidly growing market, and an increasing variety of enterprises are employing RFID to improve the efficiency of their operations and to gain competitive advantage.
In the aviation industry, major airports and airlines have been looking for the opportunity to adopt RFID in the area of baggage handling for a long time.
Many pilot tests have been done at numerous airports across the globe.
RFID tags were found to be far more accurate than bar codes, and their performance was also measured to be well above that of bar codes.
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