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No more lost baggage?

Airlines and airports around the world are looking at RFID technology to overcome the problem of mishandled baggage, says Abhinav Singh.

On an average, airlines globally spend as much as $1.6 billion a year on mishandled baggage. Dealing with each lost bag costs an airline about $100, not to mention the loss of customer goodwill. According to sources, British Airways loses about 18 in every 1,000 bags, and the airline reimburses an average of $100 per mislaid bag. Luggage is lost largely due to damaged, misread or lost sticker barcodes. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has also issued guidelines for compensation for lost baggage, whereby an airline passenger is entitled to make a claim, with maximum liability of the airline being limited to $20 per kg or a maximum of $635 per piece of checked-in baggage.

The use of radio frequency identification device (RFID) technology by airlines and airports is set to revolutionise baggage handling by making it very difficult to lose bags; along the way, it will help airlines and airports save large sums of money. It has been proved that RFID tags have accuracy rates exceeding 95 percent, and can help reduce baggage losses to the minimum. RFID technology has been endorsed by IATA, which says that the technology will improve customer service considerably in terms of reduction in mishandled baggage, security requirements, and maintenance costs. Let us take a close look at how this technology is shaping up, and about the deployment of the technology across airports in different parts of the world, including India.

A tag on my bag

As a bag with an RFID tag passes through a scanner, a pulse of radio waves awakens the tag, which responds by transmitting a small burst of data. RFID tags can be inserted into luggage, reducing the likelihood of them being separated from bags. These tags can be read without direct line of vision. The system comprises a baggage tag consisting of a microchip with an antenna. Reader units located in airports send out electromagnetic waves that activate the tag and enable it to send back the information required to ensure that the bag is dispatched to the right conveyor, to the right aircraft, and finally retrieved correctly. Explains Ravi Mathur, CEO of EAN India, “RFID technology does not require any line of sight, and can be read by the antenna from any direction. The technology can play an important role not only in solving the problem of mishandled baggage, but also in the safety of the airport as scanners can at once catch any unauthorised baggage piece lying with the rest of the passenger baggage.”

Need for standardisation

There have been talks to bring about the standardisation of RFID technology. Take for instance baggage bound for London via Dubai from New Delhi that is in transit at Dubai airport. Now the RFID tags attached to the baggage should be able to talk to the RFID readers at Dubai airport and then those at London airport upon arrival at its final destination. Mathur says, “Standardisation in RFID can help ensure that the technology can be used by multiple trading partners in a global supply chain scenario so that different tags and readers can talk to each other without any problem.”

A step has been taken in this direction as EPCglobal is helping to create an industry-driven standard for the Electronic Product Code (EPC) to support the use of RFID technology. EPC-based RFID technology is the result of the research and innovation undertaken by the Auto-ID Centre, MIT, with funds from 100 of the world’s largest organisations such as Wal-Mart, Metro AG, Carrefour, the US Department of Defence, US Food & Drug Administration, Coca-Cola, Philips, IBM and Accenture. EPCglobal is focussed on creating global standards for the EPCglobal network with the aim to increase visibility and efficiency throughout the supply chain, and higher quality information flow between companies and key trading partners.

A healthy pace abroad

Airlines and airports in the US, Europe and Japan began looking at RFID systems in 2003. In 2004, Delta Airlines made the most significant commitment to RFID when it announced an investment of between $15 million and $25million to use this technology across its US network; the airline plans to have its entire system online by 2007. Schiphol airport and Dutch airline KLM are currently operating smaller pilot RFID schemes, as are Japanese Airlines and All Nippon Airways. Hong Kong International Airport has deployed the largest RFID network in Asia; the technology will be deployed across the airport’s extensive baggage-handling facilities alongside the existing bar-code system. British Airways became the most recent RFID user, and hopes to save a substantial amount in lost baggage costs by replacing the current optically-read, sticker barcode labelling with RFID tags.

abhinav@expresscomputeronline.com