RFID - Suppliers and solutions for indoor location

Project

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID): solutions for indoor localization and identification of main hardware suppliers and integrators in the Italian landscape

Customer

Medium and large manufacturing enterprises

Demand

Provide an overview of existing technological solutions for indoor and outdoor location.
At the same time, analyze the main suppliers of technologies and of hardware/software integration services in the Italian territory.

Understand for each of the companies highlighted: offered products and services, application skills (e.g. software programming, technologies, previous experiences, main sectors).
Analyze the state of health of companies by defining relevant economic and financial data.

Analyze in depth the RFID solutions in order to define the optimal solution for a specific indoor location project being developed within the company.

Services

Technology scouting for suppliers/competences research

Solution

Technology scouting focused on the research of companies active in the supply of localization technologies (RFID, Beacon, GPS) and services for integrating these technologies into development projects.

The research was based on both public sources (popular articles, promotional videos, company websites) and specialized databases (Orbis Bureau Van Dijk).

The supplier research phase was followed by a work aimed at outlining an overview of key aspects concerning the state of the art of localization methodologies and technologies. This allowed to clarify some relevant aspects in the analysis of suppliers.

The activity allowed to create a complete overview of suppliers based in Italy with experience in the development of projects involving the main localization technologies. Furthermore, thanks to the use of the Orbis Bureau Van Dijk database, it was possible to find significant information concerning the financial status of the companies of greatest interest.

The information collected was reported in a personalized report according to the specific requests of the client company in order to guarantee reusability and ease of consultation of the key information.

Description

Facing with an ever increasing level of automation in modern industrial realities, it has become essential to have technologies capable of precisely monitoring the position and movement of components and devices. These localization technologies are particularly useful in applications for traceability, anti-counterfeiting, control of AGV systems or analysis of the movement of products in line.

Existing solutions for locating objects are generally based on sending an electromagnetic radiation with certain characteristics, for example a frequency of predefined characteristics, and among these are:

RFID
NFC
Wifi
BLE
Time
UWB
GPS

The best technology for a given project is chosen on the basis of the needs of the specific application, which may include: cost, device size, interference with other electronic devices, location accuracy, response speed, software integrability. For example, NFC technology is used for short distance recognition, while LoRa or GPS are generally used for outdoor location.

Each of these technologies requires specific in-depth analysis concerning both the hardware used for implementation and the software integration suitable for using the data collected by the tracking. Consequently, in order to give a complete overview of the offer of products and services, the list of technologies treated and implemented has been reported for each of the suppliers analyzed.

Ample space within the research has been dedicated to RFID technology so as to be able to define the type of tag and reader most suitable for the application developed by the applicant company.