Realization in the business community of the benefits of widespread adoption coupled
with advances in manufacturing techniques and efficient data-handling methodologies is
fostering explosive growth of radio frequency identification systems. RFID-enabled applications
have grown at a tremendous rate with system deployments in a number of
industries such as pharmaceuticals, health care, transportation, retail, defense, and logistics.
An important aspect of RFID technology is its utilization in a wide spectrum of
applications. RFID technology can help a wide range of organizations and individuals
realize substantial productivity gains and efficiencies. Existing system components integrate
the benefits provided by RFID while maintaining system modularity and efficiency.
Radio frequency tags allow objects to become self-describing, communicating their identity
to a close at hand RF reader. RFID is replacing bar-code–based identification mechanisms,
as communication between a reader and a tag is not limited by the requirement of ‘‘lineof-sight’’
reading and each tag has a unique ID. RFID technology enables the optimization
of multiple business processes through the improvement, the automation or even the
elimination of existing processes, and the emergence of new processes called intelligent
processes or smart processes, which are automatically triggering actions or events.