Description:
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a form of Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) technique (Ishikawa et al., 2003). RFID is recently being used in a wide range of areas such as Supply Chain Management (SCM), health care, traffic monitoring, retail, and access control (Polniak, 2007). The ability to store large amounts of data and identify items which are not in the line of sight has given RFID technology an edge over other automatic identification approaches such as the barcode based systems (Ishikawa et al., 2003) and optical character recognition systems (OCR)(Phoenix Software International, 2006). As an example, RFID technology integration in SCM systems has resulted in the reduced losses and improved visibility in various stages of supply chaining (Sheng et al., 2008), reduced numbers of data entry errors, efficient inventory management, and lower human labor costs in distribution centers (Tutorial-Reports, 2007). A binary code comprising a field of bars and gaps arranged in parallel configuration is used by the barcode based identification systems. The analysis of the reflected beam on the bar gaps, allows the numerical and alphanumerical interpretation of the barcode sequence made up of narrow and wide bars. The interpreted value obtained specifies a unique code that is used for object identification. The disadvantage of the barcode system is that the barcode needs to be aligned in order to be read by the laser scanner (Ishikawa et al., 2003). The OCR based systems consist of optical machine readers used to recognize alphanumeric codes which are placed on the objects to be uniquely identified. The …