The role of radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies in the textiles and fashion supply chain: an overview

doi:10.1533/9780857098115.1

Fashion Supply Chain Management Using Radio Frequency Identification (Rfid) Technologies

2014, Pages 1-12

https://doi.org/10.1533/9780857098115.1 Get rights and content

Abstract:

Barcode and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology have been widely applied in automatic identification and tracking throughout the textiles and fashion supply chain. This chapter will first compare the differences between these technologies and discuss how RFID technology can perform better than barcode technology in various aspects. The fundamentals of RFID technology, the architecture of an RFID system and an overview of the application of RFID technology in the textiles and fashion supply chain will be described.

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Cited by (7)

Using radiofrequency identification (RFID) technologies to improve decision-making in apparel supply chains
2016, Information Systems for the Fashion and Apparel Industry
One of the most widely discussed information technologies in the literature on apparel supply chain management is radiofrequency identification (RFID). RFID technology can help identify the products, visualize the product flow along the supply chain, and improve an operation's efficiency. However, the system's investment cost and its return, tag placement, and successful read rate drive fashion retailers to delay full RFID adoption. Indeed, various RFID pilot test projects have been conducted to evaluate the true performance of an RFID system. This chapter aims to illustrate how an RFID system can be implemented in the fashion industry through a case study. We observe that RFID system is commonly used for shop floor management, logistics, and distribution management, and customer relationship management. Our findings generate managerial insights for academicians and practitioners to better understand the application scope and potential benefits of employing RFID systems in apparel supply chains.
A mechanised 3D scanning method for item-level radio frequency identification of palletised products
2015, Computers in Industry
Citation Excerpt :
An RFID-enabled gate-door is established to emulate the process of batch product distributing and receiving in a warehouse. Considering the great potential of applying item-level RFID in apparel industry in near future [18], experiments using apparel products are conducted to validate the performance of the proposed method. The rest of the paper is organised as follows.
The automatic, non-line-of-sight characteristics of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology for identifying multiple objects are conducive to full visibility and traceability of individual product items in a supply chain. However, practical implementation of item-level RFID-based applications necessitates solving some critical issues. Among these issues, reading tag data to identify a relatively large number of individual product items, which are usually packed in batches and distributed on pallets, is particularly a bottleneck, because it affects the accuracy and trustworthiness of batch distribution of products and all subsequent logistics operations in the supply chain. Current techniques for batch identification at item-level of palletised products suffer low reading rate and incomplete tag data acquisition, rendering the RFID systems unreliable. We address this issue by proposing a mechanised 3D scanning method for identification of tagged products in large numbers to facilitate supply chain management. The proposed method requires installing RFID readers only in the X-Y plane. The readers scan tagged products in the X and Y directions while the pallet is simultaneously rotated around to be effectively scanned in the Z direction. Different scanning patterns are adopted to alleviate the problems due to randomness of tag orientation and reader collisions. As such, 3D scanning of RFID tags for item-level applications is effectively achieved without incurring much hardware cost. The performance of the proposed method is validated using an RFID-enabled gate-door for identification of palletised apparel products with item-level RFID tagging. Experiment results show that the proposed method can achieve batch reading rates remarkably higher than those reported in literature. Moreover, a correlation between the batch reading rate and the batch density is established. Apparently, the proposed mechanised 3D scanning method for batch identification of item-level tagged product items can substantially enhance the accuracy and reliability of RFID-based supply chain management systems.
An RFID-based intelligent decision support system architecture for production monitoring and scheduling in a distributed manufacturing environment
2015, International Journal of Production Economics
Citation Excerpt :
The accuracy of production data in these systems relies on the effectiveness of production data capture and monitoring. In labor-intensive manufacturing industries in China, the collection of production data mainly relies on manual recording, barcode scanning, and radio frequency identification (RFID)-based techniques (Wong and Guo, 2014). Manual recording and barcode scanning usually result in incomplete and lagged data, and barcode labels easily become wrinkled or smudged during labor-intensive production.
Global manufacturing companies have some pressing needs to improve production visibility and decision-making performance by implementing effective production monitoring and scheduling. This paper proposes a radio frequency identification (RFID)-based intelligent decision support system architecture to handle production monitoring and scheduling in a distributed manufacturing environment. A pilot implementation of the architecture is reported in a distributed clothing manufacturing environment. RFID and cloud technologies were integrated for real-time and remote production capture and monitoring. Intelligent optimization techniques were also implemented to generate effective production scheduling solutions. A prototype system with remote monitoring and production scheduling functions was developed and implemented in a distributed manufacturing environment, which demonstrated the effectiveness of the architecture. The proposed architecture has good extensibility and scalability, which can easily be integrated with production decision-making as well as production and logistics operations in the supply chain. Lastly, this paper discusses the difficulties encountered and lessons learned during system implementation and the managerial implications of the proposed architecture.
Design on improvement of traceability process in the outsourcing of logistics’ activities using the internet of things (IoT) applications
2020, International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology
Influence of boxing conditions on reading performance of fabric-based UHF RFID tags on garments
2018, Textile Bioengineering and Informatics Symposium Proceedings 2018 - 11th Textile Bioengineering and Informatics Symposium, TBIS 2018
A rule-based assistant system for managing the clothing cycle
2016, Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering

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