Airport Trcking luggage With RFID

Airport Authority Hong Kong, which operates the facility, believes RFID tracking will greatly improve customer satisfaction and security. It will also, according to Matrics, significantly cut the airport’s operating costs. Hong Kong International Airport is one of the busiest airports in the world, and a major hub for passengers transferring from flights to and from China. Approximately 35 million passengers use the airport annually, and 40 percent of the luggage handled there comes from transfer flights. Passenger numbers are also expected to grow significantly as the number of flights to and from the Chinese mainland continues to grow.

RFID technology will be deployed across Hong Kong airport’s extensive baggage-handling facilities alongside the existing bar code system. All items of luggage (both those checked in at the airport and those transferred from incoming flights) will continue to be fitted with a bar-coded label bearing a 10-digit IATA (International Air Transport Association) number. However, as each item arrives at the luggage-handling conveyor, a machine will automatically stick a smart label to each piece of luggage, a bar code scanner will read the bag’s bar-coded label, and the label’s IATA number will be written to the bag’s RFID tag. Whenever a bag’s bar-coded label isn’t read properly, that bag will be diverted and the process of writing the IATA number to the RFID tag will be handled manually.

One key aspect of deploying RFID is to improve the accuracy of the existing bar code system. "The current bar code system is 85 to 95 percent accurate," Shoemaker says. To identify luggage ready for loading onto planes, readers will be deployed on the luggage-holding system’s four huge luggage carousels. Readers will be deployed also at the lateral conveyors, which take luggage to loading piers where luggage is manually transferred to unit load devices (ULD)—large containers that are loaded onto the plane. An RFID reader will be clipped temporarily to each ULD to ensure that the correct luggage is loaded into the correct ULD, and then unclipped once loading is completed. The system will automatically create a manifest so that items of luggage can be traced to specific ULDs.


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