Peter Conway LONDON
RFID tags for baggage have been on the horizon for some years. Are they now on the verge of being adopted?
Pity the poor barcode baggage label. Strapped on a suitcase handle at check-in, it is subjected to conveyors, chutes, ramp loaders and rough treatment by baggage handling staff. Even in its pristine state, it has at best an 80% chance of being accurately read by a barcode reader. With each transfer, each loading and unloading, it gets folded, squashed or crumpled, and readability declines. With so much opportunity for hold baggage to get misdirected, the miracle is that most of it does not.
Enter RFID (radio frequency identification) tags. Inside what looks like a normal barcode label is a thin plastic strip which comprises a tiny computer chip and a loop of wire that forms an aerial. When it passes an antenna it is activated and transmits its message. Unlike a barcode, which is just a 10-digit number, the RFID tag can carry up to 2kb of information, including passenger name, flight numbers and security data. Read by antennae, it can give a 99.9% accurate read rate at three times current conveyor speeds of 2m/s, even if the paper label in which it is encased gets folded or crumpled. In 1999, British Airways showed that they could be successfully read even after being left in a bucket of water.
There are other advantages. Barcode readers need maintenance every two hours and need an expensive 360í array to ensure tags lying at different angles on passing bags can be read. RFID antennas need practically no maintenance at all. BA, which trailed the technology at Heathrow in May 1999, has an antenna that has been working ever since, despite minimal maintenance.
This technology has potentially countless benefits for airports and airlines, claims IATA (International Air Transport Association) in its "Simplifying Passenger Travel" initiative. Frank van Paasschen, IATA's manager for airport services and a former chairman of its RF Working Group, sees RFID tags bringing numerous benefits. He says they will not just speed average baggage journeys through airports due to the faster possible read rates and the elimination of human intervention in misdirected bags and security procedures, but will also include frequent flier information to enable premium customer baggage to be moved more quickly. Airports could potentially handle greater throughput in less space, thereby enabling airlines to offer shorter connection times.
Given the manifest advantages of RFID tagging, and the fact that each misdirected bag is estimated to cost the airline an average $100 each, then why is RFID stuck as one of those technologies of the airline world that is permanently on the horizon but never actually happens? The main answer is the cost of the tags. Companies pushing the technology - such as chip makers Texas Instruments and Philips Semiconductors - are cagey about naming prices, but the general consensus is that the cheapest tags are currently around 50ó each. That, compared with 5ó for the average barcode tag, is too large a leap.
"Airlines are definitely looking for a figure in the mid to upper teens, ideally 10-20ó," says David Kennedy, vice-president for the Americas with the Airport Information Systems group of Ultra Electronics. He doubts that such a low cost is achievable: "Even the big manufacturers who do millions of tags feel that the figure airlines want is below the lowest manageable threshold."
Major carriers confirm cost is a key issue. BA, despite successfully trailing RFID in 1999, admits that tag cost was one issue that stopped further implementation. Delta Air Lines' director of customer service programmes, Rob Maruster, says that "with 100 million customers each year, tag cost has to be a concern" and that ideally he would like a cost of "no more than we pay for non-RF tags". Virgin Atlantic Airways admits to being enthusiastic about the technology, but says "what has prevented its application has been the high cost".
On the other hand, there is ample evidence that carriers cannot quite leave the technology alone either. "I think a lot of carriers want RFID; they are just trying to figure out how to get there," says Lou Kirk, managing director of Sextant Technologies, a consultant on most of the RF tagging trials around the world. Delta, for example, issued a Request for Information on the subject in January, and Maruster says the technology remains "compelling because of the high read rates". Virgin confirms it is carrying out research trials and "is in discussion with various technology providers". American Airlines is known to have an active interest in RFID.
There have been innumerable trials in the last few years. The BA trial in 1999 is the most famous, but the past year has also seen two trials involving Singapore Airport, one of which also involved San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver, plus a further trial at Frankfurt. Indeed, almost every US major has trailed RF technology.
Nearly all of these trials have been sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), whose purpose is a security one - to find a way to manage passenger baggage reconciliation in the USA. However, despite this narrow focus, the trials have had the beneficial effect of testing RF technology in a range of real life airport situations, says Kirk.
"Trials are expensive - up to half a million dollars - and airlines don't want to spend the money," he says. "Each of the FAA trials has focused on a specific task, and shown that RFID can work for that task. For instance, the trial between Singapore, San Francisco and Vancouver last year tested RFID for incoming baggage transfers." Another with Tower Air in 1997 proved that RF works with baggage screening machines.
Putting it to the test
The FAA trials have also led to two actual applications of RF. One, at Seattle-Tacoma involves security tagging bags for Northwest Airlines. Tags are not put on every bag, just on those of customers whom the check-in staff consider a security risk. Those bags are then pulled off the sortation system and given a manual security check.
A far larger scale application has been installed at San Francisco's new international terminal. Using Ultra Electronics technology and tags supplied by SCS Corporation of California, baggage reconciliation systems, passenger data, X-ray and other security systems are linked in order to meet FAA baggage security requirements. Kennedy says that the system is the "first fully purchased and installed RF system at an airport in the world". United was the first carrier to use it, but it will be available to all airlines moving into the new terminal.
The San Francisco and Seattle applications suggest that RFID is finally moving into the mainstream, but there are a number of notes of caution to be sounded here. The first, as Paasschen at IATA points out, is that security applications are not going to be a driver for RFID in the rest of the world, where such things are already managed by conventional systems.
The second, Kirk says, is that the FAA trials ignore the one area where the technology might be expected to have the biggest impact - baggage sortation. "RF has not yet been tested in this area anywhere," he says. The nearest to this to date has been BA, which did use RF in its sortation area, but only to test read rates, not for actual bag sorting.
Another point is that the FAA trials use a frequency - 2.45GHz - that runs contrary to the 13.56MHz approved by IATA in 1999 after its successful use in the BA trials. The higher 2.45GHz frequency gave better read ranges (a couple of metres against one for 13.56MHz), but only when operated at a higher power. This is possible in the USA, but not in Europe and other parts of the world. IATA is clearly peeved that the USA has decided to go its own way but US interests are equally insistent that 2.45GHz offers them advantages they will not give up. "The difference is pretty substantial," says Maruster at Delta.
Experts such as Kennedy and Kirk believe the only solution will be to develop readers that can handle both frequencies, but that might be a bit much for airlines - already hesitating to implement the technology - to swallow. Andrew Price, the project manager on BA's 1999 trial and now baggage team leader for Heathrow's planned Terminal Five, says the US's "veto" of the IATA standard was one reason why BA has held back from implementation. "Standardisation has to come from the IATA RF Working Group," he says.
Getting airlines on board
The other tempting, but probably unlikely, hope is to see a sign in San Francisco that airports might lead RFID implementation. The problem, Maruster points out, is that airlines will derive very little benefit from having one airport with RF capabilities. "We don't need it just at one airport but at every one," he says. "It must be a carrier decision."
Michael Urbaner, manager for systems development and consulting at Frankfurt Airport agrees: "The carriers have to bear the cost of the tags, so they have to decide if they want to adopt them. The problem is to convince the whole airline industry to use RFID, and that will be difficult."
Frankfurt participated in an FAA trial last year, but only to "keep itself up to date on the technology". Urbaner says it did look at RFID as long ago as 1995 for a specific solution - the encoding of transfer baggage - but ultimately decided that using a bin sort system was just as effective and easier to implement. Urbaner can see the advantages that RFID might have to airports that do not have such a system, but, as Kirk points out, this also shows why it is hard for any one airport to go it alone on RFID.
"The problem is that you need to start not with the hub but with the outstations," Kirk says. "You need to select the 10 or 20 top stations feeding bags into the hub, put tags on the bags there, and install readers at the hub. That is where you will get the best results early on. For example, Vancouver is dying for RF tagging, but their problem is inbound and transfer baggage, not outbound. As much as they want it, they need others to implement it first."
This brings the problem back to airlines and the cost of tags. Technology firms argue that airlines should look at the big picture. Kirk says airlines rarely factor in the cost of missing bags, and underestimate the true staff and maintenance cost of barcodes. "They also always want investment back in 18-24 months, and a roll-out systemwide in a month. RF, by contrast, is a three-year roll-out with a payback period which is just as long."
Dr Peter Harrop is managing director at IDTechEx, a Cambridge, UK, company specialising in the area, and author of regular reports on the subject. He is clearly sceptical. "Airlines might see the payback longer term, but they have other things with bigger payback and require less cash upfront," he says. "My perception is that the technology companies are pushing the idea, but airlines are saying it won't happen."
Harrop sees a third way, however, with RFID being introduced for specialist applications and gradually spreading from there. As an example, he points to Baggage Direct, a subsidiary formed by UK airports operator BAA last year in co-operation with United Airlines, a hotel group and an express parcels company.
A profitable solution?
Baggage Direct basically offers passengers arriving at London Heathrow the chance, for a fee, to hand over their baggage on the airport concourse and have it delivered direct to their hotel. RFID tagging was chosen, says Damien Ryan, technical director for KTP, the company that devised the system, "because it gives accurate readings in a fast moving area". The system was supposedly the first in the world to use disposable tags, and is due to be rolled out to other BAA airports in the UK in coming months.
An intriguing idea is to reverse the system, and use it for the remote check-in of baggage. There are security issues to be resolved first, but Virgin is interested. "It would give us the opportunity to manage the baggage in a more efficient way through the airport, which would give us the simplification on the baggage side to match other aspects of the Simplifying Passenger Travel initiative," says a Virgin spokesperson.
The carrier is actively working with Baggage Direct to see how the system might be applied throughout the UK and further afield, with the idea that "the passengers might never have to touch their bags from start to finish".
Virgin also raises the intriguing idea of issuing frequent fliers with a permanent RFID tag that could hold their details and be rewritten each time with their flight information. The same system, it says, could be linked to WAP or internet tracking so customers could track their own bags in transit. Such ideas show that despite the pessimistic signs, RFID is almost certainly on the verge of a bright future. "It is not just a replacement for a barcode tag," says Kirk. "It is an enabling technology that allows you to do things that would not be cost effective or viable with barcodes."
"Airlines need to look at the extra functionality," agrees Kennedy. "Then they will start to see the cost benefits."
Is the answer an RF tag without chips? There is a baggage tag around that can be read by a remote antenna and only costs around 25c, almost within the 10-20c range airlines say would be attractive. The antenna costs just $10,000, instead of $130,000 for a typical barcode scanner array, and it gives the same 99% read rates as an RFID system. The concept is currently undergoing exhaustive trials at Dallas Fort Worth airport. The tag is a passive, chipless tag developed by CW Over Solutions of Maryland, and marketed by its IT Link subsidiary in a joint venture with baggage automation company BAE Automated Systems. Interestingly, BAE is owned by UK company Invensys, whose chairman is the former British Airways chairman, Sir Colin Marshall. The tag works by responding with an array of frequencies when it passes the reader which identify a unique six figure number for each tag. The tags are thus processed much like a barcode, and the number identifies a passenger record on the host computer. The only snag is that as it is a six digit number, it has to be matched first to the standard 10 digit IATA number before it can be processed. John Gude, director marketing and business development for BAE, reckons the technology combines the best of RF with a tag at a price airlines can afford. He criticises IATA for adopting the 13.56MHz RFID tag as a standard "before tests on the various rival technologies are completed". The market should be allowed to make up its mind between his tag, 13.56MHz and 2.45GHz, he says. Critics think the chipless tag proponents are dreaming, however. Lou Kirk of Sextant Technologies reckons carriers will never buy a product which uses a number they can't control. "It is half the cost, but it has less than half the functionality," he says. "And you would still have to buy all the other equipment." Dr Peter Harrop believes it is a "maverick" solution, but says you never know. "Sir Colin Marshall is backing it, and he ought to know," he says.
Source: Airline Business
