| Abstract: |
The objective of this project is to enhance the capability of monitoring large facilities like exhibition halls, warehouses and distribution centers for their optimal conditions to preserve the quality of goods as well as for their efficiency and accuracy to flow through large quantity of goods. Goods being benefited from such enhanced capability ranges from cultural and historic artifacts, to luxury goods such as wine and tea in storage, to perishable and speedy delivery-demanded goods in logistics and supply chain management. The project plans to develop a pluggable RFID hardware platform, which cannot be found in any of the commercially available active RFID technologies to house various external sensor and utility modules based on different monitoring needs. The project also plans to develop a hybrid indoor communication to leverage on power line and wireless communications to facilitate a low energy data communications to support sensor data collection and utility command and control. In addition, software modules are proposed to manage all pluggable RFID hardware devices and analyze data being collected from them. A universal sensor interface will be developed for plugging in up to eight external sensor and utility modules to an active tag for logging and wirelessly transmitting data and commands. Data communication protocols developed at CUHK for large scale patient and equipment tracking in hospital will be adapted and further develop to connect thousands of such tag devices in a proposed hybrid indoor communication network infrastructure, which consists of power line and wireless communications commonly found in large facilities like museums and warehouses. The communication propagation algorithm and mechanism will also be optimized to strengthen critical paths and reduce network traffic in a vast hybrid network. Software components with ready-for-integration APIs will be developed for providing monitoring and alerting functions as well as analytics of collected sensor data for reporting and predictive purposes. The developed customizable RFID tags pluggable with various sensor and utility modules will allow environmental sensing to be carried out inside closed environment such as sealed exhibition showcases and stable environment such wine storage over years. This technology could help improve preparing adequate control of environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity, lightings, and vibrations for preserving valuable artifacts and goods. In addition, this technology will provide the flexibility in extending utility functionalities such as flash lights or displays for enhancing the signaling and tracking those goods. Pilot implementation will be taken place in Hong Kong Museum of History, Hong Kong Film Archive, and Air Mail Centre for testing R&D results and preparing the commercialization planning for the results being used in different operational environments. |
