Produktspårning med RFID

Sammanfattning

The aim of this thesis was to investigate the possibility of integrating an item tracking system

with a monitoring system currently under development at Fifth Generation Technologies (P) Ltd.

A literature study of RFID technology and the networks ZigBee and MiWi was done. Based on

the literature study a concept for a distributed system was developed.

The concept is to have several RFID readers placed in the area where tracking is to be performed

and allow them to communicate with each other through wireless communication. The RFID

readers shall be able to form zones and filter the data that is forwarded from the zones to the

servers and thus perform some of the work that the server would normally have to do. The

concept has been evaluated by prototype development and testing. The prototype uses an ultra

high frequency RFID reader and a MiWi network.

The test indicated some limitations with the selected technologies. The angle between the RFID

tag and RFID readers, the density of RFID tags and the presence of certain materials was some

of the things identified to affect performance. It was also shown that the network had reliability

problems in terms of online time.

Proposals are given on how most of the problems can be avoided. With overlapping coverage,

structuring of product flows and the need to analyze and tailor each implementation the system

becomes costly to implement and a deeper analyze of the gain must be done. Once installed the

system could prove to be a very useful resource for both accounting and the daily work.