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Argentine Airfreight
Terminal Tests RFID on Cold Storage Cargo
July 7, 2007
The Terminal de Cargas Argentina (TCA)
is testing passive RFID to track incoming and outgoing goods requiring cold storage in the cargo terminal at Argentina's
Ezeiza International Airport, serving Buenos Aires. TCA—a provider of logistics and storage services, primarily for
cargo entering and exiting Argentine airports—is conducting the two-month pilot to better understand the benefits and
costs of RFID technology.
Launched in May, the pilot employs UHF Gen 2 RFID tags from Alien Technology. TCA employees
affix the tags to pallets and cases of goods as they come into the airport and are moved to two cold storage areas (one chamber
stores goods at -8º Celsius, the other at -20º Celsius). TCA expects to use approximately 4,000 RFID tags during
the trial, each encoded with a unique identification number, to track a variety of goods requiring refrigeration, such as
vaccines, fruits, flowers and chemicals.
TCA is working with Argentinean RFID systems integrator A1-Tec, which
installed two RFID portals (one at each chamber's entrance) with two antennas at either side of the doorways. For the
pilot, A1-Tec combined Alien tags and interrogators and Zebra RFID label printer-encoders with A1-Tec's Well Edge middleware,
which manages and filters the RFID data collected.
Currently, TCA is not sharing the data collected with any customers
or business partners. However, if the pilot is successful, the company says it may expand the technology into other operations
within the cargo terminal, such as tracking baggage and unit load devices (ULDs), used to transport and load cargo onto aircraft.
A number of airports worldwide are testing and implementing RFID technology to improve baggage-handling processes,
improve security and streamline facilities management. Several airports are utilizing RFID to track luggage, such as San Francisco
International Airport (see San Francisco Airport OKs RFID Bag-Tracking Pilot), numerous airports in Korea (see Asiana Deploying
RFID at Six Airports) and others in Europe (see Air France-KLM Embarks on RFID Luggage-Tag Trial).
Source: RFIDJOURNAL
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