Track and trace for the global supply chain using RFID
Steve Hodges
Microsoft Research, Cambridge
Despite being a fifty year old technology, over the last few years radio
frequency identification (RFID) has received a huge amount of renewed
interest. This has largely been as a result of a university-led initiative
to advance the technology to a point where it can be used in the supply
chain to monitor the movement of goods. There is a lot at stake here -
companies who operate global supply chains lose an awful lot of money every
year essentially because they don't know exactly where their products are.
As a result, they are prepared to spend a significant amount of money
deploying a tracking technology such as RFID - as long as the performance
and cost is right.
In this talk I will first present the vision of an RFID-enabled world and
the reason why this vision is so appealing to global supply-chain operators
such as Gillette and Wal-Mart. I will then run through the technological
solution that has been developed through a collaborative effort between six
universities and over 100 companies. During the course of the presentation I
hope to give a flavour of the many issues surrounding the development and
deployment of the technology.
