Airbus Issues RFID Requirements, Expands RFID Usage

Ongoing RFID Implementations
According to Nizam, Airbus is also making steady progress on its other ongoing RFID implementations. The aircraft manufacturer has increased the number of RFID interrogators it uses at the A380 final assembly line in Hamburg, Germany, to more than 100.

The application tracks containers of parts used to supply the cabin furnishing equipment for the A380 (see Airbus' Grand Plans for RFID). Each container carries two passive RFID tags (EPC Gen 1 or Gen 2). The installation is now among the largest in Europe in a single facility, Nizam says, and has also been rolled out with 14 readers at an additional final assembly line in Germany—for Airbus' single-aisle airplane family.

Separately, at the end of 2008, Airbus finished rolling out a system that utilizes passive EPC Gen 2 RFID tags to track the locations of jigs, or transport frames, to help the company keep to a tight manufacturing schedule (see Airbus Trials Showing Strong Results). Workers use the jigs to transport large aircraft sections to its manufacturing and assembly facilities via a huge cargo aircraft, dubbed the Beluga.

The project was the first project to go live on Airbus' corporate auto-ID middleware provided by IBM and OATSystems. All existing projects will be gradually migrated over to the standard platform. All of Airbus' auto-ID projects, Nizam says—whether involving RFID or bar-code technology—now run on the same corporate platform, which promotes reusability and convergence, and eliminates multiple projects running on different islands of software.