More RFID Journal Sites: RFID Journal Espanol RFID Journal Brasil RFID Journal Events RFID Journal Awards
Manufacturing News
Text size:
T
T
T
Auto-ID Lab Remakes Manufacturing
Most of the focus in the RFID world has been on the supply chain. But the University of Cambridge’s Auto-ID Lab is serving as a test bed for more flexible and responsive RFID-based manufacturing systems.
By Jonathan Collins
Dec. 15, 2003—RFID has long been understood to offer greater visibility and traceability into company supply chains by tracking items from manufacturer to distribution center to store. But work underway at the Auto-ID Lab at England’s Cambridge University is starting to set out criteria and methodologies that will help extend the role of the Electronic Product Code (EPC) network into manufacturing processes. According to the lab, the work has the potential to completely restructure manufacturing in fundamental ways that have only been dreamed of before.
From its very outset, the development of the EPC Network has always rested in the care of academia. Though industry-funded, the original Auto-ID Center research program was headquartered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Cambridge University’s Institute for Manufacturing. Four other universities—the University of Adelaide in Australia, Keio University in Japan, the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland and Fudan University in China—joined the original two and all participated in the technology’s initial development.
Now that the Auto-ID Center has officially closed, its work—along with the duty of administering and developing EPC standards going forward—has been transferred to EPCglobal.
This shift has shaken up the work and the role of the university departments that once formed the Auto-ID Center’s academic core, now brought together under the new moniker of the Auto-ID Labs. While the labs will continue their EPC work, they will also have to find new ways to fund their research and development work.
At the Cambridge Auto-ID Lab, changes are already underway. The lab is launching a range of educational services, geared to EPC users and implementers, and testing services for users and vendors of tags and readers. (See Auto-ID Lab Puts Expertise to Work.) But while those offerings should help make up the shortfall in funding the lab lost when it handed over EPC development to EPCglobal, they do not represent the lab’s primary goals. The real focus of the Cambridge lab involves developing adaptable and robust algorithms and control system architectures to support new intelligent RFID-based manufacturing systems.
“Within five years we could see a new generation of manufacturing operations tightly integrating RFID into their functions,” says Duncan McFarlane, Cambridge Auto-ID Lab’s research director.
EPC technology plays an essential part in those systems under development, because EPC delivers a way to tightly couple the production control system’s decisions with the physical devices that execute those decisions. Despite EPC’s importance, the technology is a means to an end—not an end in itself within the lab.
“We are not aiming to be RFID gurus or to work on long-term research in the hardware technology of EPC,” says McFarlane. “Our point of view is primarily how to use RFID to maximize advantage and to develop software and systems to enable that.”
more Manufacturing articles
Dec. 15, 2003—RFID has long been understood to offer greater visibility and traceability into company supply chains by tracking items from manufacturer to distribution center to store. But work underway at the Auto-ID Lab at England’s Cambridge University is starting to set out criteria and methodologies that will help extend the role of the Electronic Product Code (EPC) network into manufacturing processes. According to the lab, the work has the potential to completely restructure manufacturing in fundamental ways that have only been dreamed of before.
|
From its very outset, the development of the EPC Network has always rested in the care of academia. Though industry-funded, the original Auto-ID Center research program was headquartered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Cambridge University’s Institute for Manufacturing. Four other universities—the University of Adelaide in Australia, Keio University in Japan, the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland and Fudan University in China—joined the original two and all participated in the technology’s initial development.
Now that the Auto-ID Center has officially closed, its work—along with the duty of administering and developing EPC standards going forward—has been transferred to EPCglobal.
This shift has shaken up the work and the role of the university departments that once formed the Auto-ID Center’s academic core, now brought together under the new moniker of the Auto-ID Labs. While the labs will continue their EPC work, they will also have to find new ways to fund their research and development work.
At the Cambridge Auto-ID Lab, changes are already underway. The lab is launching a range of educational services, geared to EPC users and implementers, and testing services for users and vendors of tags and readers. (See Auto-ID Lab Puts Expertise to Work.) But while those offerings should help make up the shortfall in funding the lab lost when it handed over EPC development to EPCglobal, they do not represent the lab’s primary goals. The real focus of the Cambridge lab involves developing adaptable and robust algorithms and control system architectures to support new intelligent RFID-based manufacturing systems.
“Within five years we could see a new generation of manufacturing operations tightly integrating RFID into their functions,” says Duncan McFarlane, Cambridge Auto-ID Lab’s research director.
EPC technology plays an essential part in those systems under development, because EPC delivers a way to tightly couple the production control system’s decisions with the physical devices that execute those decisions. Despite EPC’s importance, the technology is a means to an end—not an end in itself within the lab.
“We are not aiming to be RFID gurus or to work on long-term research in the hardware technology of EPC,” says McFarlane. “Our point of view is primarily how to use RFID to maximize advantage and to develop software and systems to enable that.”
