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On Location
Find out more about McCarran International Airport in our first On Location Series' article, "Air Power"
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By April, McCarran will begin affixing stick-on RFID tags to bags. At the same time, the explosive-detection systems will be moved from the terminal floor to a separate bag-screening area. By December, the RFID chips will be embedded into bag tags. The chips and readers are being supplied by Matrics.
For McCarran, the alternative to RFID was optical scanning using barcodes. These require more labor because they are often scanned manually. RFID tags are scanned passively, as they move through conveyors. Even when conveyor systems are designed to scan barcode strips automatically, they sometimes fail if the strip is placed even a fraction of an inch off its mark. And barcode printers must be carefully maintained, especially in a dusty environment like an airport.
RFID tags are also more accurate than barcodes. Optical scanners generally have an accuracy rate of 85 percent to 89 percent, Ingalls says, compared with 99.7 percent for RFID.
This may not seem like a huge difference, but in McCarran's case, 90 percent accuracy means as many as 6,000 bags must be addressed manually every day. In this way, McCarran's RFID project represents a real test of the technology's scalability. To date, the largest airport RFID implementation handles only 5,000 bags per day, compared with 60,000 at McCarran.
Ingalls and airport director Randall Walker visited airports that use optical scanning to track baggage, and they tried to estimate the cost of employing people to manage such a system and handle misrouted bags. At current prices, RFID probably still costs more than optical scanning, even accounting for the extra labor required for barcodes. But it won't be long before RFID prices drop enough to make up the difference and then some, Ingalls says.
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