Mar 18, 2022With its latest product offering, Tageos has set out to address the growing need for baggage-tracking labels with RFID functionality for legacy airline tracking systems. Early this year, the French technology company released its EOS-350 M700 inlay in an effort to offer airlines continued access to RFID technology products despite IC shortages throughout the supply chain. The company calls the inlay the market's smallest dedicated IATA resolution-compliant UHF RFID product, and the first to leverage Impinj's M700-based inlays with ARC Spec U certification
The inlay leverages Impinj's new, more readily available chips, which come in a smaller footprint, ensuring more chips per wafer and thus more availability at a time when wafers are difficult to come by. This, Tageos explains, offers a degree of sustainability for track-and-trace applications. The inlay's compact size includes an antenna 17 percent smaller than the next smallest product on ARC's Spec U approved inlay list, the company claims. Tageos says that while the smaller chips are more readily available in large volumes, their relatively high sensitivity poses a challenge, as the performance may be too high for existing airline RFID-reading systems.
The EOS-350 M700 inlay
Spec U guidelines define a minimum performance threshold, while airlines systems have a maximum threshold. The RF characteristics of the new inlay are intended to address this issue, while also meeting the requirements of existing RFID reader systems at airports. Airlines and airports are deploying the Tageos product with paper baggage labels, while using their existing RFID reader infrastructure to read the tag data as baggage is routed through the airport. The companies have asked to remain unnamed.
The IATA first announced a global mandate for RFID inlays in luggage tags in 2018. Since then, airlines been deploying the technology at airports to capture the unique ID numbers and routing information of baggage tags automatically as they move down conveyors to and from flights. While deployment rates slowed during the COVID-19 pandemic due to travel reductions, adoption has resumed as more travelers have returned to airports.
However, the shortage of RFID chips has created challenges when it comes to legacy products, says Jeremy Wade, Tageos's sales VP for the Americas. Therefore, the company has built its solution using Impinj's M730 IC, enabling it to leverage the capabilities of the latest IC technology and inlay performance, while addressing one of the primary challenges facing those adopting RFID in large volumes: the relative short supply of ICs. The EOS 350 will replace the EOS 409 and is the smallest inlay approved for ARC Spec U, according to Chris Reese, Tageos's head of product management.
Jeremy Wade
As Reese explains, Spec U guidelines address a performance threshold for existing aviation baggage-tracking applications. "They cannot be exceeded due to [the risk of] stray reads," he says. The introduction of more sensitive tags into an environment designed for less sensitive performance introduces the potential for disruption, Reese notes. Some existing applications are "very finely tuned," he states, adding, "and the zones are very well isolated with the existing technology."
Airports typically have a network of conveyors that can be situated physically close to each other, which introduces the challenge of stray reads if readers on one conveyor were to capture reads of bags travelling on another. Although RFID is most commonly being used for the tracking and tracing of luggage and routing, stray reads could impact loyalty programs and passenger-facing applications that provide visibility into the location and status of checked bags. For instance, if a stray bag tag were read from a bag travelling on a nearby conveyor, the wrong information could be forwarded to a passenger.
Imagine this scenario: passengers drop off luggage on their way to a flight. The bags travel down a conveyor headed for their plane, but a reader on a conveyor receiving bags from another flight captures the tag read. That could prompt a message to be erroneously sent to the passengers that their incoming bags have been routed to the baggage-claim terminal. With this surprising information, they might go searching for their luggage, leaving the departure area. "Obviously," Reese states, "that's not a very pleasurable travel experience."
Additionally, routing information relies on accurate tag reads, without stray data capture. Thus, it was important that the new inlay not exceed Spec U performance thresholds, despite the new chip's high sensitivity. Tageos's developers engineered the new inlay to provide interoperability with legacy aviation baggage-tracking systems and the older RFID solutions being used there. The EOS-350 M700 employs an aluminum antenna measuring 60 millimeters by 30 millimeters (2.4 inches by 1.2 inches).
The smaller antenna helps to ensure that the tag meets the shorter-range performance requirements, the company reports, while the inlay's smaller footprint and related weight reduction (about 20 percent) makes the tag more sustainable. Reese says the small size of the inlay, including chip and antenna, makes it more cost-effective due to a smaller use of raw materials—and fewer materials used means a smaller carbon footprint. "You gain a lot of efficiencies as you go smaller," he explains, with lower shipping effort and costs.
Prior to the inlay's introduction, Tageos reports, the challenge faced by the aviation industry was the potential for existing RFID applications to become obsolete as tags became more sensitive. The company's new tags are in use by several large airline companies in full volume, Wade says, following testing that was completed during the fourth quarter of 2021. The inlay is built into baggage labels and is encoded at the time the labels are printed for passengers. At a kiosk or baggage desk, a printer will encode relevant data onto the tag, such as the airport for which it is destined. That information is captured by fixed readers as the luggage travels the conveyors, and it is routed automatically based on those reads.
As the pandemic eases and travel resumes, Wade says, "There's a lot of demand for baggage tracking and a lot of demand for the baggage inlay." Business travel remains limited globally, but tourism has been accelerating. That affects the number of bags being checked with each passenger, he notes, since leisure travelers typically bring more bags than business travelers do.
In the long term, Tageos is developing a family of baggage tags that could be built into new RFID reader systems, but the EOS 350 serves as a bridge enabling fast adoption by airlines with their existing technologies. "So this product addressed a need [by airlines] to make sure there wasn't that deficit in the market," Wade states.
