April 2011
2 posts
6 tags
Another Offshore Industry Wakeup Call!
Imagine going to sleep in your room in a 700 bed hotel, setting your alarm for 7:30 a.m. and drifting off to a good night’s rest. The next morning, you are not woken by your alarm clock, but a much louder evacuation alarm telling you to evacuate your hotel because it is sinking into 125 feet of water 50 miles offshore! This is not a dream, it happened just this month in the Gulf of Mexico. The...
6 tags
The Real Costs of not Automating Offshore...
There is an accident somewhere around the world on an offshore drilling platform almost every day. Many are not newsworthy, lacking serious injury, loss of life, or an environmental impact. Occasionally they are catastrophic, like the BP Deepwater Horizon accident in the US Gulf of Mexico that happened on April 20th, 2010. This accident, which resulted in 11 tragic deaths and 17 severe...
October 2010
1 post
RTLS Series - All RTLS systems are not created...
In the last post, we looked at the different types of available RTLS systems. This week we will take a look at one that uses RSSI for location calculation. In an RSSI system, the distance between a tag (attached to an object or person) and a reader is determined by converting the value of the signal strength at the reader into a distance measurement based on the known signal output power at the...
September 2010
1 post
2 tags
RTLS Series - All RTLS systems are not created...
Real-time Locating Systems (RTLS) have been on the market for over a decade. Although they have many similar components due to utilization of active RFID technology, and a common goal to provide asset location identification (whether it is a pallet, vehicle or a person) in a real-time; the way the systems actually achieve this is often fundamentally different. While many RTLS systems use active...
August 2010
3 posts
5 tags
Interoperability for active RFID: at last,...
Active RFID is the style of RFID that has been around the longest. It has remained, until the 18000-7 standard, a world of conflicting proprietary approaches ranging from frequency choice to low level protocol nuts and bolts. There was no inherent advantage for any one vendor to share its technology or to push for a common approach – the market was still very much about differentiation due to...
In todays world it is essential that we are...
We constantly challenge ourselves on “how can we better optimize? How can we do this smarter? How do we increase our margin?” It is all about performance and quality. In the industrial world there are several challenges with safety in the area of oil and gas, mining and tunnelling. How will the optimizing process impact the safety? There should be a way to increase performance without...
The Added Value of Deploying Sensor Based Networks
We often talk about the importance of being efficient. How intelligent technology can enhance business processes to save the bottom line. How streamlining workflow can contribute to a significant return on investment. This is all true. But what we don’t discuss often enough is how technology, when used effectively, can have a significant impact on the environment. For me, I am particularly proud...
July 2010
2 posts
“The adoption of a standard within the active RFID industry will have a profound...”
– Gerhard Schedler, CEO, IDENTEC SOLUTIONS
4 tags
Issue of Interoperability in Active RFID
Until recently, in the active RFID space, interoperability had not existed. Most players in this space have been keeping their technology proprietary, with variations in frequency allocation and channel utilization, anti-collision, interference avoidance and other factors. Perhaps you are wondering what is the reason for this? There are several. The main reason includes a lack of standardization...