A project is underway to create an active tagging system that enables tags on products, vehicles or people to automatically communicate with other tags.
Barrels that ‘talk’ to each other to improve safety, and smart shelves that automatically log inventory changes, are just some of the ways businesses stand to benefit from new sensor network technology being developed in Europe.
The IST-funded Cobis project is going a step beyond existing radio frequency identification (RFID) systems – the generally passive smart tags used to identify goods – to create Collaborative Business Items (Cobis) that can shift a substantial part of business processes from resource-intensive back-end systems to systems embedded in the products themselves. With sensors, wireless communication and computing components attached, the goods or equipment become smart: drums will warn operators when the storage limit in a warehouse is reached, if a leak occurs or if one is placed in the wrong location.
“What we are doing is making sensor network technology useful to businesses by creating a system that responds to the need for real-time information. It allows goods to act and react automatically to changes at the local level, and warn operators of the change,” explains Cobis co-ordinator Stephan Haller at SAP Research in Germany.
The system will be tested at a BP plant in Hull, UK, later in 2006, where the sensor nodes will be attached to barrels of chemicals .
Unlike most RFID systems – still an emerging technology in its own right – that mainly work passively to distinguish between tagged objects with their own unique identifier, Cobis-enabled objects work actively by incorporating embedded sensing, computing and wireless
short-range communication. They can monitor the state and environmental conditions of the goods they are attached to, communicate peer-to-peer and collaborate to observe conditions that no single sensor would be able to detect.
The same sensor network technology could also be applied in other sectors, such as food, where monitoring the condition of a product is crucial.
For more information, visit http://istresults.cordis.lu
