RFID applications
RFID technology is applied to various areas such as
pharmaceutical industry, heath care, logistics, retail, and
security to name a few. Among these areas, the RFID
technology has been used increasingly in SCM of logistics
(Singh, 2003) for the efficient management of short shelf life
goods (Karkkainen, 2003), container transport (Hengst and
Sol, 2002), and automated delivery tracking system (Song
et al., 2005). RFID could be used to ensure quality control
during production. To classify some application areas of
RFID, an open ended list of that is:
. agriculture;
. airline industry;
. animal identification;
. health applications;
. traffic light control;
. equipment tracking;
. food industry;
. livestock;
. manufacturing industries;
. material management;
. parking cars;
. pets identification;
. pharmaceutical industry;
. railways;
. retail industry;
. RFID as a speed passes tool; and
. SC coupled with RFID.
A number of these application areas are discussed in more
details below:
1 Song et al. (2005) presented a method for extending the
application areas of RFID in the construction sites
intending to determine the precise location of tagged
materials. For this purpose, the performance
experienced with a commercially available RFID
system is compared with the theoretical performance
derived from an analytical discrete framework. The
problem of managing and tracking equipment has
always been considered as a serious problem in
construction sites.
2 The potential benefits to RFID technology in the food
industry are enormous. Because each chip is unique to
the specific box it is