RFID Tags
Written by Michael Burnett
Operation Desert Storm only lasted 43 days, but the Department of Defense supported it with an unprecedented shipment of supplies for that relatively short period of time.
“For either good or bad, it happened to be one of the most well-supported conflicts, where we sent a lot of sustaining materials almost haphazardly. We sent them to support this war with no real direction as to the distribution or storage of these materials,” recalled Ralph Ocasio, chief of operations at the Joint Automatic Identification Technology (J-AIT) Product Management Office within DoD.
“So when the war ended quickly, we had this iron mountain of containers just stacked there at the ports at the distribution points. A lot of this material had no disposition instructions—no instructions on how the assignee was or what the materials were. Now it was a logistical nightmare.”
DoD was faced with decisions to make. It could retrograde the equipment back to the United States if possible. To do that, warfighters would have to spend time opening the containers to see what was actually in them and then determine if they were salvageable. Failing that, they could dispose of the materials on the spot. Either way, DoD spent valuable time, money and manpower just to clean up those unused supplies. It would also lose money on items such as medical supplies that could not be returned.
So military leaders determined that they required a better way to gain visibility as to what was inside of supply boxes, Ocasio told Military Logistics Forum. Starting in 1992, the Pentagon authorized proof of principle tests and pilot programs that determined that radio frequency (RF) identification (ID) could solve the problem through placing an RF tag within a container or a pallet and creating an electronic shipping label. The RF tags enabled warfighters to determine the contents of containers and pallets simply by scanning the tag.
“As an added benefit, after analyzing the capabilities of that technology, we determined that it could also provide us with in-transit visibility if we built an infrastructure that could support that,” Ocasio said. “So not only can I see what’s inside the container without having to physically open or for that matter without having to be that close to it, I can also see where it is at or where it was last seen.
“That’s important because if it is stuck while it’s in transit, we could make some kind of decision as to whether we want to delay it, speed it up, or divert it or something. So we have two capabilities there for the price of one,” he added.
Security and Utility
Within the Army, the Logistics Integration Agency (LIA), which serves as a research and development clearinghouse, received the original mission to prove RF technology could do the job. Among the brightest minds charged with solving the problem was John Waddick, a logistic management specialist known in DoD as the “father of RFID.” Although Waddick officially retired last January, he still consults for J-AIT.
DoD currently used an active RF tag that can hold up to 128K bytes of information, Waddick told MLF.
“You have to understand that an active tag is data rich,” Waddick explained. “The tag carries all of the information that you need on it to do a transportation or supply transaction. In a passive tag, you only have a license plate number. It means nothing unless you have the information that goes with it. The issue becomes that is an EDI transaction to a database. You have to have assured communications to make sure you receive it in a timely manner so that you can use that number. An active tag has everything on it, so you don’t need assured communications.”
The tag query system uses in-transit visibility (ITV) servers operated by J-AIT. Warfighters can look up their shipments over the Unclassified but Sensitive Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet). This system makes these tags useful only to authorized warfighters.
The tags deployed to the Persian Gulf in support of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq do not contain any sensitive or classified information, Waddick emphasized. Furthermore, whatever information they do contain would be worthless to enemy forces that could figure out how to read them.
“If a vehicle is moving by you, the best you can hope to get is maybe the tag number. If you don’t have access to NIPRNET, it doesn’t mean anything to you,” Waddick commented. “And if someone is standing there and scanning things from it, then you have another problem called physical security. We only have a couple hundred feet range. You literally have to be within visual sight of somebody to collect that information.”
Andy Smith, a retired Army colonel and now a J-AIT senior consultant, has spent most of his career as a military logistician. Warfighters can use RF tags to track more than containers, Smith noted. For example, placing an RF tag on a HMMWV enables Army forces to follow individual vehicles as they move about their business. The idea is not to track the vehicles as part of a convoy, but rather to keep tabs on an expensive and useful piece of equipment.
“You can put a tag on just about anything,” Smith told MLF. “You will always put one on most containers, which could have anything in it—whether it’s 20 foot or 40 foot or whether it’s unit equipment, re-supply, sustainment or retrograde items.
“If you are sending it home, you can put a tag on it to find out where is your stuff,” he quipped. “That’s the technical term we would use in the field. Where’s my stuff?” Using the tag number associated with a shipment or piece of equipment, a soldier can access the ITV servers to discover the last location of that asset. Therefore, warfighters can determine that ordered supplies are in the pipeline or place the location of valuable assets.
“This gives me an invaluable tool in my logistician’s kit bag. Now with reasonable predictability, I can adjust logistics operations to support a change in combat operations. Now I can see my logistics pipeline while it is working,” Smith declared. “A soldier has is M-16. A logistician now has his RF tag.”
Current Status
The RFID system really got underway with U.S. military forces shortly before the conflict in the Balkans, when the United States became involved in the fight in Bosnia and Kosovo, Ocasio recalled. DoD set up transportation lanes and tracked its assets as they left the United States and went to support the U.S. Army Europe (USAREUR).
As of 2007, the RFID program has spread to about 2,600 sites around the globe, enabling warfighters to interrogate RF tags or write to them. All major routes have received RF instrumentation, including all major ports of embarkation at both air and sea as well as most ports of debarkation in support of operations in U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM).
DoD tracks nearly 19,000 shipments per week. Warfighters can query the status of specific shipments over the NIPRNET via the ITV servers. A total of five ITV servers support that network, one each serving areas of southwest Asia, Europe, the United States and the Pacific while one serves training operations. In addition, a small ITV server provides information for military classified networks.
DoD manages this program itself due to the incredible importance of it to warfighting operations. However, it does turn to commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technology to support the program and also hires contractors to maintain the networks and equipment for the services.
With regards to COTS technologies, Savi Technology of Mountain View, Calif., provides RFID products to support the J-AIT supply chain visibility effort. Four overall contracts supply total support to J-AIT operations: RFID-II, AIT-II, AIT-III, and MAIT-1. Under the RFID-II contract, an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity vehicle for a period of five years, Savi provides DoD with RF transponders, interrogators and deployment kits as well as technical engineering, training and maintenance services.
Much of the COTS technology become elements of a network operated directly by J-AIT, and Unisys Corp. currently holds a contract to help maintain the network under a RF-ITV Support Services contract currently scheduled for a recompete this summer.
“It has always been a government-owned and maintained infrastructure,” Ocasio said. “Because the information is of somewhat sensitive nature, and the requirement is that we need this infrastructure to be in place and operating during uncertain and sensitive times. On a day-to-day basis, an integration contractor performs our maintenance of that infrastructure. But we didn’t see how we could contract out the operation, maintenance, and increase and decrease of infrastructure to a company that may or may not be around when we need it the most.”
Many of the J-AIT contracts originated in 2003, when DoD stood up the product management office. RF technology remained in a research and development capacity for a long time before becoming an official program within the Army that year, Ocasio noted.
That long development time, however, has made the J-AIT team highly regarded experts in the world of RFID. As such, they find that they often provide guidance and input to other federal agencies when they have questions about RFID. Other government agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the White House, and the State Department have tapped DoD’s 15 years of experience with RFID.
“We provide consultant services, for lack of a better term, even though we are a government agency,” Ocasio said. “We have been doing this; we are very good at it; we have a very large infrastructure in place. It’s been very useful. And it didn’t come easy. There were growing pains.”
Future
Waddick offered MLF a view of where DoD will be taking RFID technology in the near future.
“You are going to see a family of tags—not just one commodity tag like we have today,” he stated. “You are going to see asset tags that will go onto an asset for its life. Transportation people who want to mark air pallets can put a tag on there and track the air pallets for their life cycle. Container people are looking at similar tags.”
J-AIT is also exploring sensor tags that are able to read light, shock vibrations, temperature and humidity. These tags monitor conditions within a container to ensure that its contents remain safe against extreme changes in environment. At manned checkpoint nodes, warfighters can read these sensor tags and see if any of their parameters have been exceeded. If so, they can take corrective action.
The warfighters stationed at those nodes would also be able to read security tags, which J-AIT is also exploring with some prototypes.
“We want to know if anybody opened that container,” Waddick elaborated. “There would be a latching mechanism and a light mechanism. If you open that container, the light is going to get you or you will trip the door mechanism so that we know the container has been opened. So if they re-shut it, and we arrive at a node, you can sit down at a node and see that something is wrong and something has been exceeded in this container. So we can know that and have the ability to take action at that node.”
In addition, J-AIT would like to use its historical data to add the capability of telling warfighters when their cargo will arrive through RFID asset tracking. This “smart” capability would provide a soldier with the last known location of his equipment but it would also give him a fairly accurate idea of when he is going to receive it.
“We want to be able to give him a reasonable expectation of when he should be able to look for that. That’s what smart is all about,” Waddick described. “We are going to do that in an automated fashion. It’s similar to when you go to UPS, they can give you the last known location and when to expect it. That’s what we are trying to do in the future.”
Beginning with the next recompete for contracts, J-AIT also is moving to the new ISO/IEC 18000-7 RFID air interface standard, Waddick noted. That move helps to simplify products and encourage competition in RFID technologies. ♦