An RFID Case Study for Air Cargo Supply Chain Management

Air freight is an important part of the global supply chain. In particular, various high-value electronic products need to be transported efficiently by air freight. Currently, many air freight forwarders still rely on manual operations to process air cargo. These manual operations may affect target service levels due to handling delays and human errors, and result in high operational costs. In this paper, we present a novel Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system and a case study for air freight forwarding operations. The proposed system includes a hybrid RFID system architecture (a combination of data-on-tag and data-on-network approaches) and an integrated RFID air cargo check-in and check-out gateway system with cargo movement detection capability. The system can help air freight forwarders to (i) enhance freight operational efficiency, (ii) efficiently encode data into memory-limited RFID tags, and (iii) facilitate logistics management using a cost-effective RFID-based system. Index Terms — Air freight forwarding, logistics management, RFID technologies, Supply chain management