Radio Frequency Identification has the potential to revolutionize logistics, but first it must overcome its reputation as an intrusive technology Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) may have been around for some time, but only in the past 12 months has it become one of the hottest buzzwords in information technology, attracting the attention of government chiefs.

Latest forecasts put worldwide spending on RFID at $US90 billion ($A116 billion) by the end of 2008, with between 50 and 100 RFID projects believed to be under way in Australia alone.

One of the biggest of these is the Australian e-passport, which was given the green light in February when the Australian Passports Act 2005 was approved by the Senate.

In another project, the Australian Defence Organisation put out a tender for the provision of an RFID systems analysis in March, which foreshadows a much bigger RFID initiative involving the streamlining of defence materiel handling and logistics.

In Victoria, the state government is eager to benefit indirectly from the technology by setting the state up as the RFID centre of Australia. Late last year, the government launched a new industry cluster - Vic RFID Action - said to be the first of its kind in Australia, which received $100,000 in seed funding from the Bracks government to establish a collaboration of providers, users and others involved in the research, development and application of RFID.

"The potential of RFID technology is enormous, with many industry experts already predicting that it will have as big an impact on the way companies do business as the Internet," Minister for Information and Communication Technology Marsha Thomson said at the launch of the program.

Shot in the Arm for RFID

The use of RFID in logistics received an enormous shot in the arm from the formal approval of the EPC UHF Generation 2 (UHF Gen2) specification by the EAN.UCC international product numbering associations in February. This marked a milestone in RFID technology, eliminating two of its greatest hurdles: standardization of the passive RFID technology and interoperability between tags, readers and printers.

Texas Instruments and Philips Electronics are in a race to be the first to bring out mass production of RFID tags, which have the potential to replace barcodes on individual items. It is expected the International Standards Organization will approve UHF Gen2 as an ISO standard, part of the 18000 series for RFID by the end of 2005.