Friday, November 02, 2007

Lost luggage

It's difficult to lose a passenger, to stick them on the wrong flight, they have a nasty tendency to ask questions. Sadly luggage doesn't have that ability which is why estimates show that 15 per 1000 pieces of luggage get 'lost' in the system. So to my mind only three options present themselves:

  1. The airports and airlines buck up their ideas.
  2. Luggage responsibility is removed from airports and airlines and given to third-parties.
  3. Sentient Luggage™
How would option one be implemented? RFID perhaps, if every piece of luggage is scanned as it's booked in it can be and a tag placed and linked to that flight and passenger. This should automate the procedure as luggage is sorted out to it's correct tractor and as tags can be read at a distance you can simply pass the tractor-load through a scanner as it heads out and any wrongly placed bags or missing bags will cause the system to scream.

So picture the scene - the load goes through and a bag is placed where it shouldn't. The load is dismantled and hand-scanned to find the offending article; that means some delay, but is similar to the 'luggage without passenger' problem. The reverse is the load being stopped because it's missing some luggage - so where is it? Oh dear either you hunt it down thus causing a delay or you carry on without it. The system marks it as missing and assigns it to the next flight out; if it finds it.

So option one helps keep track of everything provided it remains in system and none of the luggage looses its tags, which is pretty much the system already in place.

Option two get some couriers to deliver the luggage separately. This could make sense, your luggage is picked up by the couriers a couple of days before and is loaded on a dedicated cargo plane. Any rush against time is countered by the earlier pick-up, giving extra chance for mistakes to be rectified, and the cargo plane can carry luggage from multiple airlines and airports. The couriers don't care which plane you're on (or even which airport you're travelling to or from) they just need to know where to pick it up from and where to deliver it to.

Okay we've all had fun with couriers, but this is a nice bulk operation (which should keep the excess price down), it means the passenger planes are lighter (use less fuel) or can be made with reduced cargo space to carry more passengers (less fuel per person). That's offset by the increase in cargo planes and delivery vans, but as a solution it could work well.

Option three, yeah well would you want luggage that could talk back to you "You are not putting that shirt in here, I refuse to carry anything that hideous."

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is an alternative to RFID. My current employer (who I won't name, to inhibit Googlability, and so I'm clearly not advertising) makes a product that's vaguely similar to RFID, but rather than an interrogator that just finds IDs of nearby tags, has sensors that go in the corners of a room or warehouse and track the positions of all the tags therein, in real time. This means you get to find out if items are being put in the wrong place, when it happens rather than afterwards. If a load turns up at the plane missing a piece of luggage, just ask the system where it is.

Logistics is one of our main markets, and we can increase efficiency and reduce lossage by providing both real-time feedback and an audit trail, integrating with CCTV systems so you can bring up footage of an item's movement through your warehouse with one click.

But there are some problems we'd have to solve to use it for air luggage. First, the tags can't be used on an aircraft, because they use UWB and 2.4GHz radio. Also, the tags are about $30, rather than the sub-penny cost of RFID tags, so it would be unfeasible to tag each item of luggage. One way around this we've done before is to use a hybrid system: each item gets an RFID tag, and all the RFID scanners, trucks, and large containers get our tags. Then every time you pick up an item on a truck, put it in a container, or scan it into or out of a warehouse, the system knows that item is with that truck, and it can track the truck. If an item falls off the truck, the system knows wher the truck was when it fell off, and can raise an alarm immediately.

FlipC said...

Hmm take three on leaving a response.

I don't mind pimping businesses, but it's your call. It sounds an interesting product shame about the frequency and the price tag. But as you say a hybrid system would work.

So not naming names how many wearable tags have you been asked to produce in order to monitor people's movements?

Anonymous said...

We do quite a few, but not for the reason you think. The price tag is just too high for call-centres and similar employers to get any ROI out of it. We have had a few where workers in logistics warehouses have been anonymously tagged for a week or two, to help the company increase its efficiency by improving its processes, but not to tell it who to sack. We've had trolley-tracking projects to help supermarkets improve their layouts (read: move the bread aisle yet again), but none in the UK (yet). Other people-tracking applications we've done include tracking workers on building sites, toxic chemical, petrochem, or radioactive plants for safety and to monitor where people are getting radiation doses from, and tracking Alzheimer's sufferers, hospital patients, and doctors (I'm sure you can think of several reasons why). Office workers are not popular to track, but there have been a handful to do with maximising office layout efficiency, monitoring meeting room popularity, and automatically directing phone calls to the right part of the office. We have a project on at the moment as part of instrumenting a newly built office block which will automatically turn lights on and off, and adjust the air conditioning, according to where people are in the building, in order to save energy.

If someone approached us with a really privacy-invading application, I can't say we wouldn't take their money, but we're quite keen to avoid such publicity, and we'd probably advise them to do it a different way. In the past with worker tracking, we've consulted with the workers' groups to make sure it's clear exactly what any data collected would be used for, and to explain how the system protects their privacy, for example by having no mapping from tags to identities. We have a whole load of white-papers on the subject on our website, which I'm sure Google will find you if you remember where I live :->

Anonymous said...

Globalbagtag.com, the world leaders in internet based luggage tracking, has developed a RFID enabled luggage tag for tracking lost luggage worldwide via the internet at http://www.globalbagtag.com

This is the latest innovation by the forward thinking company, which was established in 1999 to combat the growing problem of lost baggage and has sold their unique luggage tags to travelers around the globe.