Helping Bags Make Their Flights

By Andrew Price


Technology Benefits

The appeal of RFID is that you can identify a tagged item without needing to see the tag—or indeed, the item itself. This provides some advantages over a traditional bar code label and allows us to address the reasons for delayed baggage.

The infrastructure needed to implement an RFID baggage-tracking system is relatively cheap. While a 360-degree bar code reader capable of reading labels traveling at 2 meters per second is a complex machine with many moving parts and read heads, the RF equivalent is quite simple by contrast. The RFID interrogator (reader) has no moving parts, just two or three antennas, and costs only a few thousand dollars. This means you can have many more read points in your baggage system, allowing an increase in the resolution with which to monitor your processes.

This increased resolution lends itself to process improvement and redesign, allowing the same infrastructure to deliver greater performance and capacity. As air travel grows, this will become an issue for every airport in the world, some much sooner than others.

A faster process also means bags on the cusp of missing their intended flight have a greater chance of making it to the plane on time, which translates to better service for passengers and savings for the airlines.

Let's take a closer look at the four reasons for baggage delay in an airport, and see how RFID infrastructure can mitigate each problem.

• The bag arrives too early to be loaded onto a plane and must be stored: At the entrance to the storage area, an RFID reader monitors the bag as it enters, and later when it departs. At the appropriate time, the storage room operator is notified that the plane is now accepting passenger luggage, and is instructed to collect the bag.
• The bag is delayed due to processing through security or other steps: When a bag is waiting in a queue for processing, there’s no way for employees to know if the bags in front of it are more or less urgent. With RFID, it would be possible to know exactly which bags were urgent and which had a greater window for processing.
• The baggage system breaks down and cannot deliver the bag to the departing aircraft: When a baggage problem like this occurs, what matters most is the time to recovery. With RFID, you can read a number of bags, identify those that can still be dispatched to their intended flights and prioritize the return of the others. There is no point in reassigning bags for a flight that departs 12 hours from now while those that can travel straight away are left waiting.
• The bag arrives too late and cannot be processed in time: Even RFID cannot offer a time machine for your bag, so if you have checked in too late, or if your inbound aircraft arrives too late for your bags to be transferred to your connecting flight, then RFID can not help you. But RFID would enable a faster overall processing, which means it might take less time to process your bag. As such, the opportunity to miss a flight would likely be reduced.