A Real-Time Location System (RTLS) enables you to locate and track assets or people. With this data in your hand, you can also manage, analyse and leverage data improving and controlling processes in your production line.
Many industries benefit already from the possibilities of RTLS, not only conventional industries like tyre manufacturers or automotive, optimising production and eventually saving money, time, and resources and avoiding accidents.
RTLS needs two things to work: Technology (hardware and software) and assets that can be tracked. Assets can be everything, for example, vehicles, tools, merchandise or spare parts. As assets in a production line are material objects, they need a digital twin: a representation in the digital workflow. Tags attached to assets will convert them to digital objects and duplicate them - as physical objects in the production line and as immaterial objects in the process control software.
Many technologies can be used to create RTLS, for example, infrared, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, RFID, Ultra Wideband, GPS, Cellular and many more. In this whitepaper, we focus on RFID for the following reasons:
We mentioned that RFID works as a tag and reader setup from a hardware perspective.
In general, an active RFID tag will send out signals and, if in range, detect location sensors. Then, the tag calculates the distance to each location sensor based on the readings. Once the position data is defined, the information is broadcasted to the fixed or mobile readers. A built-in motion sensor, user request, or timed intervals can trigger the positioning event.
As your business software environment knows dozens of applications for planning, managing and monitoring assets, processes and people, integrating RTLS is another additional challenge. Thanks to the middleware and business application layer of RTLS, that's easier than it may sound. It doesn't matter if you integrate RTLS RFID or another technology into your existing software stack. The middleware handles converting signals and data and transferring them to your other applications. In the case of RTLS, it is about integrating real-time visibility seamlessly into business practices.
Effective RTLS integration can result in many significant benefits, such as streamlining inefficient procedures, eliminating redundant data, adding new business value, increasing scalability, and unifying device management.
What are the main ingredients of RTLS
Why is RFID an important part of RTLS hardware
What kind of software do I need for a RTLS to work
How to include everything in one integration
What are the key benefits of your RTLS integration