Jan 18, 2007An intra-city bus company in Mexico began testing a new tire-tracking system this month. Sigmatire, from Actia Mexico, uses RFID to combat tire theft and monitor the number of kilometers a tire has been driven. The bus company, which Actia officials have declined to identify, will run the pilot for 30 days, studying environmental and operational conditions, such as how well the tags can be read based on where they are attached to the tires.
The bus company is using 10 of its 8,000 buses to test the system, says Samuel Lara, Actia's engineer for operations for the Mexico and Central American regions. If the 30-day trial is successful, the bus company will install RFID tags on all the tires of its entire fleet of buses.
"Here in Mexico, there is a problem with tire theft," says Lara, noting that even bus drivers steal new tires during their runs, replacing them with older, less valuable ones. In addition, Lara adds, "tires are one of the more expensive items for maintenance." Affixing tags to the tires helps prevent theft, monitor the kilometers the tires have traveled and help track maintenance operations, he explains.
RFID made its way onto tires several years ago. For example, Michelin North America rolled out a system five years ago, using passive RFID tags integrated with pressure and temperature sensors so fleet truck mechanics could automatically check the air pressure in a vehicle's wheels after a driver returned it to its terminal or garage upon completion of a route. Earlier this month, Michelin began offering an updated version of its RFID tire system, the eTire Pressure Monitor (see Michelin Shrinks Its eTire Pressure Monitor).
In addition to tracking the tires with RFID, the bus company uses a satellite system provided by Advanced ID. This satellite system tracks all the buses en route in real time, while also collecting data via sensors, installed under the bus dashboard, that indicate how buses are being driven. For example, the sensors track speed, providing the satellite details on how fast bus drivers are driving during their runs. The data collected via the sensors and satellite system is integrated with the bus company's back-end SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
Each day, when a bus leaves the garage, it passes an interrogator that captures the unique ID number of each tire's RFID tag. As the system scans the numbers, it checks them against data stored in the bus company's ERP system, which links tires to specific vehicles. Armed with this data and the satellite information, supervisors can track who is driving a given bus, its mileage and whether all tires on that bus are the ones originally installed by the company. "Also," Lara says, "they can analyze performance of the tire" by comparing the distance a tire has traveled against a physical inspection of that tire. "Not all the different tires have the same quality—in this way, they can select the best tire and also detect anomalies in the operation conditions," he says, such as driver performance or improper inflation.
According to Lara, Actia's Sigmatire can be managed either in-house by the company using it, or on a Web site hosted by Actia. The Mexican bus company has not yet integrated the RFID pilot with its ERP system, but he says it plans to do so if it decides to fully implement Sigmatire.
European companies have shown an interest in similar systems, reports Advanced ID's president and CEO, Dan Finch. "We are talking to several manufacturers and distributors in Europe who have expressed interest in the [RFID] tire tag," he says, "including, France, Luxembourg, Finland and Israel."
