I have a chance to visit the Hong Kong International Airport on March 2, 2006. If you travel out of Hong Kong and have some check-in luggage, then you will find that rectangular RF tag (two yellow-orange strips with 'HKIA') on each piece of luggage. The following is what I learned from the visit, accompanied by Mr. WONG Yiu Fai and Mr. Wong Man Ho, and later further briefed by Eric W.L. Wong and Mr. Howard Eng.

As departing passengers of HKIA check in their luggage at the respective airline counters, each luggage piece will be issued a long white bar-code tape and 'tied' likely to the handle of the luggage. It then is routed through to a central baggage handling area. At peak time, there would be around 7,000 pieces in an hour. The baggage handling system is designed to handle 13,000 bags per hour (see the Powerpoint presentation by Howard Eng, Airport Management Director at the Open Forum, June 2005, hosted by the Center of Cyber Logistics).

These luggage bags come into the primary sorting area as they will redirect to two larger sorting areas to the left and right with respect to the primary sorting area. These two areas, the secondary sorting, will sort out the bags and 'drop' the bags to pickup areas for the respective airline. The bags are loaded into ULD's (Unit Load Device) and trolleyed to the airplane for loading.

As the bags enter the primary sorting area, they are manually tagged - yes, someone sitting some point of the conveyor belt, 'armed' with rolls of HKIA RF tags!! Once it is tagged (each RF tag is already written with a UID - unique ID and the tag is read-only), each bag is passed through a bar-code reader and RF reader. The bar-code reader picks up the LPN (license plate number) assigned to the bag by the DCS (departure control system) of an airline at the check-in counter; and the RF reader picks up the UID. Thus, the LPN, as is associated with the passenger, airline, flight, and destination information stored at the back-end system, is now paired with the UID of the RF tag now on the luggage bag.

As this bag travels to the secondary sorting area, it 'knows' where to go as readers/antennas are positioned to read the UID and appropriate actions are enabled. As the bags are loaded on an ULD, its location is recorded along with the ID of the ULD that was keyed into the system also.

Basically, that is the operation of the baggage handling system at HKIA with RFID technology in place. Next, I will discuss issues associated with such application.