Transponders in the floor communicate with the reader on board of the truck.Experts forecast Radio Frequency Identification, RFID in short, a great future within logistics. These smart radio labels are an effective means to accelerate the flow of material in industrial and commercial applications considerably when used together with industrial trucks fitted with the respective equipment. Currently material is traced by manual data recording, handheld scanners and central data processing These activities between goods receipt and dispatch are time consuming and prone to errors. Pan-operational systems are virtually unknown. A survey with 150 logistic companies that was conducted by the Hamburg based STILL GmbH in the frame of the project IdentProLog has now shown that there is a great interest especially in the use of RFID to register and trace material. The project scopes the flow of information between the transported goods on the loading aid on one hand and the industrial truck on the other with STILL as the leading party when equipping the industrial trucks.
The company from Hamburg has not accepted this task out of nowhere. They have already started to develop RFID supported industrial trucks some years ago enhancing the vehicles with additional functions to optimise operational processes. In this the RFID technology is to be applied in ways going far beyond the conventional use of the radio labels. Respective solutions are already available and can be implemented immediately. The company from Hamburg uses RFID to localise trucks and to optimise the operational procedures on the basis of the data made available by the localisation.
The system allows to infer the storage position of a certain good from the conditions of the truck such as its location and the lift height. The storage location detected in this way is transferred to the central warehouse control by wireless LAN and the storage location needs not be localised manually any more.
