COMPUTER experts at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) have developed an air cargo processing system using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology using a five-centimetre-square chip, a Flexible RFID Encoder and Decoder (FRED),
to speed up identification and processing purposes and replace manual labelling and scanning of barcodes.

" D a t a c a n b e u p d a t e d i n s t a n t l y, i n t e r m s o f milliseconds," team leader and PolyU professor Henry Chan told the South China Morning Post.

DHL Global Forwarding chief executive Kelvin Leung, whose firm is the partner in the project, said using FRED reduces the chances of human error which account for the causes of many lost shipments and blockages in cargo flow.

"A lot of the time when you talk about the cost of logistics ... it really comes down to the point-zero-something per cent of errors," he said.

FRED comes with an integrated RFID gateway with movement detection capability for both air cargo check-in and check-out operations. It can also be complemented by a webcam-based movement detection mechanism. Thirdly, the system has a tag
rewriting mechanism, which allows flight information to be written onto the existing RFID tags automatically during the check-out process.

The project started in 2008 with over HK$4 million (US$0.51 million) grant from the HKSAR Government's Innovation and Technology Fund.