RFID holds significant potential to streamline and improve operations at Airports globally. Process areas range from baggage handling and food service tracking to plane repair and maintenance operations to security and even retail operations within airport concourses. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) is championing the use of RFID for all of these areas through standards activities (IATA introduced an RFID baggage tag standard in 2005) and focus projects. The IATA estimates that the global airline industry could save US$760 Million annually just from RFID baggage processing with estimates in the US$ Billions when cargo, freight and parts processing is improved with RFID tracking.

There are many opportunities for ROI in Airport Operations:

• Security Regulations Compliance
• On Time Departure - plane refueling, food service, passenger processing
• Customer Service - lost bag, faster bags, faster connections
• Labor Optimization
• Parts pedigree & Electronic Maintenance Logs
• Smart Recall - bag retrieval
• Work Scheduling
• Airport Operations Optimization - smart gates
• Asset Utilization - baggage carts, tugs, air cargo containers

An RFID Infrastructure for Airports - The use of RFID at airports creates many requirements for an expandable, sustainable infrastructure. As baggage, parts and planes move around the globe, the infrastructure at each airport must be capable of handling RFID tags from all geographical regions. Plus, the RFID technology choices must work for closed-loop, open-loop and cross-enterprise data collection and exchange involving many processes and potentially many companies and governments. In fact many airport operators will need to implement an infrastructure that will service all of the constituents that use their airport facilities, each with their own data and tracking requirements, but serviced by a common RFID network provided by the Airport owner or operator.

Processes will incorporate both fixed/portal type readers and handheld/mobile readers to facilitate tag data capture at many locations for many subscribers. And, most airlines and airport operators envision incremental use of RFID over time as they expand the number of tracking locations, deployed readers and consuming applications across their enterprises. The Reva Systems Tag Acquisition Processor (TAP) delivers the scalable infrastructure platform that Airport operations can depend on to generate value now and in the future.

The Reva TAP supports most major reader brands and models with simple point-and-click configuration. The Reva solution provides a graphical user interface that allows implementers to define physical facility layouts, place fixed readers, indicate benchmark reference tags for coordinating and dynamically determining mobile reader locations, create business location representations and once deployed - remotely manage and monitor facility level RFID networks. Configuration tasks can also be automated to facilitate rapid rollouts for deployments that incorporate 100's of facilities.