A significant number of RFID pilot projects have been implemented in the European railway sector. Some projects were launched many years ago, and at the time of their inception, there was not yet a high level of awareness regarding GS1 standards for RFID, or they were not yet fully developed, which led to the selection of proprietary solutions in older projects.
The RFID project in the railway industry, carried out under the auspices of the GS1 organization, covers two areas: wagon tracking and Maintenance and Repair Operations (MRO). The second area, MRO, is currently in the development phase, and this text will focus primarily on the issue of wagon tracking. Since railway wagons cross national borders, it is essential to take into account the varying levels of advancement among project parties and to agree on a common standard. Failure to do so would mean that infrastructure managers would have to use different types of readers placed along the tracks, wagons passing through different countries would need to have different tags, etc.
Sweden, together with Finland, decided to support the GS1 in Europe initiatives promoting the EPC Gen 2 standard. During a meeting in Stockholm in February 2011, project participants agreed on the use of EPC Gen 2. The next step was to define a common identification standard—this is the Global Individual Asset Identifier (GIAI)—and a common approach to information exchange. Currently, there are at least 8 European countries with varying levels of pilot implementations based on UHF Gen 2, and at least two others are conducting preliminary studies. Some of these countries implemented their own solutions based on active tags but decided to switch to tags compliant with the UHF 18006-C standard. For example, Russia is considering dual labeling for 1 million wagons and is testing their marking with both active tags and ISO 18000 6-C tags.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2/2012.