Application of Radio Frequency Identification Technology for Management of Light Weight Temporary Facility Members

In order to keep track records of periods of actual usage of light temporary facility members such as pipes, scaffolding plates and frames, experiments were executed by using passive Utlra-High Frequency (UHF) band Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. Tags were pasted onto steel pipes, scaffolding plates and frames for investigating the readability in a number of different ways. The thickness of a base for appropriate opening between a tag and a metallic object, the location of tags, and installation methods were investigated to achieve simultaneous identification of multiple members. The experiments showed UHF band RFID systems can be used and better performance over a compared 2.45 GHz band passive RFID system. A prototype database system for reading the RFID tags to obtain the ID data and for keeping track records of the usage of the light weight temporary facility members was developed. This system can be used for selecting old temporary facility members to be abandoned.