EU project to launch five RFID pilot tests
Following a year of research and development, the EU-funded BRIDGE project is now preparing five pilots to test Electronic Product Code (EPC) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies. The pilots, scheduled to start in September, will test RFID across several sectors of industry including retail, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, distribution and logistics, and services. The Electronic Product Code (EPC) is a family of coding schemes created to succeed the bar code. It was created as a low-cost method of tracking goods using RFID technology. RFID is a method of identifying unique items using radio waves. Typically, a reader communicates with a tag, which holds digital information in a microchip. BRIDGE (Building Radio frequency IDentification solutions for the Global Environment) is a three-year €7.5 million project funded under the EU's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). It is made up of a consortium of 30 partners from the worlds of industry and research. BRIDGE was created to research, develop and implement tools enabling RFID and EPCglobal applications, as well as to drive the acceptance of EPCglobal standards in Europe. The first pilot to go live will test the use of EPC second-generation technology to track pallets of pharmaceutical products as they move through the supply chain, from the manufacturers through distributor networks and on to hospitals and pharmacies. 'The purpose of the pilot is to use RFID to know where the goods come from, and where they are at any given moment,' said Henri Barthel, the coordinator of the BRIDGE project. 'With RFID, the idea is that the technology can help companies manage the supply chain in a much more accurate and efficient manner.' The pilot will aim to trace a number of products, identified at the carton and pallet levels using EPC RFID tags and 2-D bar-code labels. According to the organisers, deploying this 'hybrid environment' of RFID and bar-coding will afford them the chance to discover the pros and cons of each technology. In addition to RFID tags and 2-D bar-code labels, the pilot will incorporate a network-based system allowing the participants in the project to store, access and analyse all data collected during the experiment. Ultimately, the objective of the pilot will be to increase the safety of patients by improving the traceability of pharmaceutical products and certifying the pedigree or authenticity of these as they move from the manufacturer to the final user. Another pilot will be in the retail sector where BRIDGE will test the use of second generation EPC RFID to track cartons and pallets of clothing from the point of manufacture to the store. The pilot will track the goods as they move across the supply chain, but could also include novel in-store applications such as using RFID tags to identify individual garments, and installing RFID interrogators in dressing rooms so shoppers could obtain detailed product information about the items they are trying on, such as sizes, prices and availability. Lastly, three more similar pilots will take place in food manufacturing processes, reusable assets and products in-service. The results of all five pilots will be made available by the project as it seeks to promote the uptake of standardised EPC and RFID technology for use in global supply chains. 'Since its inception, RFID has been hailed as the panacea for a more sophisticated and efficient global supply chain,' said Mr Barthel. 'The BRIDGE project will transform RFID from being an identification technology into providing an EPCglobal based product information network.'