Real-Time Location in the Automotive Industry

During the launch phase thousands of vehicles are produced in order to supply the dealer at the announced commercial launch. At the early production stage quite a number of repair and retrofit jobs are done. It is not possible to park the repaired or retrofitted cars in an orderly manner. The cars are brought to other regions of the plant site, thus the result is a chaotic parking and the cars cannot be found back in time. The produced cars have to stay at the plant site until the approval from business is given. After the approval the cars have to be delivered to the dealer. Due to the chaotic parking systems the searching for specific vehicles causes a lot of extra workload internally. In order to save costs and time OEMs implement Real-time Location Systems (RTLS) based on RFID to guarantee an accurate location follow-up of parking cars. This paper describes the deployment of passive RTLS on the Ford plant site. Hereby the focus will be on the inter-corporate use with suppliers in the supply chain