Lufthansa Cargo Completes Large-Scale RFID Pilot

Air cargo carrier Lufthansa Cargo has successfully completed a pilot deployment of a real-time location system (RTLS) at its Lufthansa Cargo Center in Frankfurt, Germany. This is reportedly the largest scale such pilot application of passive RFID to date in the air cargo industry.

Lufthansa Cargo is testing this radio frequency identification (RFID)-based technology to locate single cargo shipments, pallets and containers on a real-time basis, with the goal of enabling better control of loading and shipping processes, sustained improvement in efficiency and quality of processes, and reduced costs. After extensive tests and simulations Lufthansa Cargo will apply this new solution in a set of real processes, to be followed by a fully deployed pilot installation integrated into all real processes of Lufthansa Cargo in Frankfurt.

"Our target is to integrate the RFID technology into our handling processes to increase the reliability of loading and transport processes,” explains says Karl-Heinz Köpfle, board member operations at Lufthansa Cargo. “We want to pass these new improvements and benefits of automated RFID based data exchange on to our customers in the near future."

The STAR system, an RTLS from Mojix, offers compliance with a global tag standard as well as the capability to both read and locate RFID tags. Any passive UHF tag based on the global standard EPC Gen2 can be used. These standard EPC tags cost only a few Eurocents and are as thin as a sheet of paper.

The Mojix technology enables reading of passive RFID tags and retrieves information about the location of the tag and thus the location of the associated cargo shipment. The system can locate passive tags within a very large coverage area with accuracy of about 1 meter. This technology enables use of RFID for location of goods, aggregation of pallets of goods and assets, and improved accuracy in track and trace processes.