Airbus looks to smart RFID

Airbus has signed a seven-year contract to use EPC Gen 2 radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to track thousands of repairable parts for its new A350 XWB planes, reports RFID Journal.

Airbus plans to tag around 3 000 parts per plane. About 1 500 parts will require high-memory tags on which maintenance data will be stored.

“The Airbus story is only the beginning for high-memory, passive RFID tags," says Holger Kisker, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, in Germany. "Smart solutions with intelligent tags will find their way quickly into many industries in asset management and other business areas."

An alternative energy project funded by the Abu Dhabi government, called the Masdar Initiative, is testing electric vehicles as part of its research for developing a zero-energy community, states RFID News.

Developed by Dutch company, To Get There, the cars are unmanned and not based on any tracks. Instead they are guided by a series of magnetic sensors embedded in the roadway, which communicate with RFID sensors in the vehicle.

The cars go as fast as 25mph (about 40kmph), running on batteries that last approximately 37 miles (60km) on a single charge. The batteries are recharged using a second battery pack that was charged during the day using solar panels.

The Dayville Conn Fire Company in the US has rolled out RFID tags to fire fighters to track them during an emergency, says Government Technology.

The fire company deployed on-site emergency resource tracking (ERT) from Michigan-based ERT Systems. The tag fits into a fire fighter's suit and broadcasts his location to the reader and to the management software.

This allows incident commanders to easily generate an account of the entire incident and where each fire fighter is at all times.