Chapter 4. Application Areas
The potential application of RFID technology is
limited only to one's
imagination
. Although a popular belief holds
that RFID is best suited to supply-chain management or
consumer packaged goods
(CPG) industries, the
range of current RFID applications goes far beyond these areas. In
fact, a variety of established RFID application types have already
been deployed successfully in real-world environments. An
application type
consists of
several different application
members
that share the same
characteristics of the application type. These application types
are denoted by the
term
prevalent
in this book to
emphasize
that these are the most commonly applied
areas of RFID today. Note, however, that this is not an official
term, but is used for the sake of convenience.
The full potential
offered
by RFID does not stop
at the prevalent application types. RFID is an emerging technology,
and as such, tremendous potential lies ahead to apply it to areas
that can utilize the benefits of the technology. Currently, some of
these areas are in the prototyping or planning stage, some have
just started to be explored, and others are not yet getting
sufficient attention from the industry or from
vendors
. In short,
these application types need to mature to a point of validation
(both technological and relating to business processes) before
being rolled out into production. This book calls these application
types
emerging
, to highlight the
fact that most of these application types have yet to become
prevalent application types. Again, the term
emerging
is not an official term, but is used
here for convenience.
Whereas a whole application type can be
emerging, some members of a particular prevalent application type
can be emerging, too (item tracking and tracing, for example, and
inventory monitoring and control, discussed later in this chapter).
When RFID begins to be used in these types of applications, a whole
new suite of yet undiscovered applications might unfold. An
application at a prototype stage today might very well be rolled
out as a business application in the near future. Therefore, the
application types and members
belonging
to prevalent and emerging
types will vary over time based on technological advances and the
willingness
of the business community to apply the technology to
solve new problems.
This chapter discusses examples of both
prevalent
and
emerging
applications, as of this writing, to
give you an idea of the application potential of the technology.
This book uses the terms prevalent and emerging for both
application types and members belonging to application types. You
will understand the distinction between these two entities from the
context. Note that this chapter does not attempt to list every RFID
application that exists today or that might exist in the future.
Instead, this chapter covers some of the most important
applications that exist today and that might be possible in the
future, with the hope that you can identify similar applications
and associate them with the ones discussed here.
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