RFID

Product piracy poses an increasing threat to manufacturers and providers of products in the industrial sector. Therefore the application of technical solutions for the protection against product counterfeiting and copying becomes more and more important. In this context, especially the use of RFID technology constitutes an effective instrument for tracking original products and components along the supply chain and also for quick and reliable verification and confirmation of their authenticity. Within the joint project MobilAuthent, supported by the BMBF, a solution for forgery-proof product authentication and tracking along the supply chain based on RFID is being developed. This article introduces the first project results as well as the MobilAuthent concept. The presented solution can be flexibly adapted to different company and product-related requirements.

The ongoing development of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) opens up new possibilities to parallelize information and material flows. Manufacturing processes can be provided with real time information and new lifecycle services (e.g. definition of optimal cutting parameters, life cycle data, etc.) can be realized. In this paper the advantages of RFID on metal cutting tools are discussed. RFID on tools can support an efficient tool management and help to automate manual activities within the manufacturing process.

The transparency of location and status of loadings and load carriers is particularly important for efficient warehouse management on seaport terminals. Today detection of load carrier movement processes and modified status information is insufficiently supported by software systems. An automated IT-based load carrier management system offers a wide range of opportunities for tracking and tracing positions and status information of loadings and load carriers. A permanent monitoring of changes regarding location and status allows the usage of innovative stock-keeping strategies, search time reduction, decrease of relocation processes and overall an improvement of the traffic flow on the seaport terminal area. This article addresses the design and modelling of a system that enables automated detection of location and status of load carriers on seaport terminals combining innovative information and communication technologies for identification, communication and localisation tasks. ...

Today, the maintenance of pump systems is based mainly on either a breakdown strategy or a time-based maintenance strategy. There are several disadvantages of these strategies: the required availability often is not reached, unscheduled downtimes occur and costs increase because of necessary redundant resources. In future, the requirements of a plant for efficient and cost-effective operation can only be reached through predictive maintenance. In this context, the combined use of technologies like RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and condition monitoring techniques is a possible solution to increase the efficiency of operation and maintenance. This is accompanied by significant technology-driven organizational changes in maintenance as simplification of work procedures, additional personnel qualification requirements and decentralization of maintenance activities, i.e. on-site maintenance of pumps. Thus, the efficiency and effectiveness potentials of maintenance will be realized ...

On the technical level there are different possibilities to fight counterfeiting and to prohibit the use of counterfeited parts in machinery and equipment. The aim should be to enable the machinery control to recognize the exchange of wearing or the assembly of additional parts automatically and to check its originality independently. RFID offers not only the conditions to realise the suggested functions but also to implement additional benefits for manufacturer and customer.

Globally increasing imitation of products increases pressure on introducing protective concepts. Analyzing constraints such as the product and the distribution process and examining protective measures are the conditions for protecting effectively. A balance between technically achievable solutions and economically justifiable efforts is to be found. Therefore, a research project of the Institute of Integrated Production Hannover focuses on RFID based authenticity certificates in folded boxes for pharmaceutical products.

The following article describes an integrated method to calculate the investment and (cost-) effectiveness of a process optimisation using innovative techniques like RFID. It is based on the research project IdentProLog. Starting with analysing and optimizing processes it‘s possible to evaluate them with a method like activity-based-costing. The detailed information about process-times for each resource will be taken from a material flow simulation. Using this way its possible to create and format data with a high confidential level. Furthermore, it is possible to consider dependencies between technical resources, even in your investment analysis.

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 ...

Existing PLM solutions provide mature methods and functionalities for the management of processes and data of virtual products in the early product lifecycle phases. Appropriate solutions for managing information of individual real physical products within the production, use and end-of-life phases are not available. In this article an approach for a product-individual information management is presented, which is based on a product traceability solution.

In production logistics of the machine and tool manufacturig industry RFID-systems are implemented more and more. Enterprises expect an improvement of efficiency in tracing containers and material provision. Implementation of RFID often fails because the processes should be adopted as they are and limits of the technology are not known sufficiently. This article shows the limits of RFID in tracing containers in production and introduces an approach of implementing RFID-supported processes.