RFID in textile and clothing manufacturing: technology and challenges

Introduction The rapid pace at which the technological innovations are being introduced in the world poses a potential challenge to the retailer, supplier, and enterprises. In the field of Information Technology (IT) there is a rapid growth in the last 30 years (Want 2006; Landt 2005). One of the most promising technological innovations in IT is radio frequency identification (RFID) (Dutta et al. 2007; Whitaker et al. 2007; Bottani et al. 2009). The RFID technology was evolved in 1945 as an espionage tool invented by Leon Theremin for the Soviet Government (Nikitin et al. 2013, Tedjini et al. 2012). At that time it was mainly used by the military. The progress in microchip design, antenna technology and radio spread spectrum pushed it into various applications like supply chain management, retail, automatic toll collection by tunnel companies, animal tracking, ski lift access, tracking library books, theft prevention, vehicle immobilizer systems, railway rolling stock identification, movement tracking, security, healthcare, printing, textiles and clothing (Weinstein 2005; Liu and Miao 2006; Rao et al. 2005; Wu et al. 2009; Tan 2008). RFID can make the companies more competitive by changing the related processes in supply chain, manufacturing and retailing. Abstract