Boeing pilots RFID to track aircraft parts

Boeing is piloting RFID tags and wi-fi technology to track and locate aircraft parts across its vast manufacturing factories.

Each individual aircraft is made up of around two to three million parts and Boeing's Everett factory north of Seattle in Washington State is the largest building in the world, covering one hundred acres.

In an exclusive CIO Vision Series video interview with silicon.com sister site ZDNet, Boeing Information Technology CTO Vaho Rebassoo said the company is working on a technology called 'real-time location service' (RTLS) to help keep track of all those parts.

Other video interviews in the CIO Vision Series include

♦ British Airways
♦ Reuters
♦ Virgin
♦ Vodafone

The RTLS technology uses wi-fi access points to pick up signals from active RFID tags on the aircraft parts and then uses triangulation or time-stamping to check the exact location of each part.

Rebassoo said: "So that can help you find a part that might be lost. And given the size of our factories, if something gets lost it can take a long time to find. I can remember the days when we had a flyer come by and they ask you 'have you seen this part?' and the part is 20 feet long and 10 feet high."

The RTLS technology, which is still in pilot phase, also helps track parts from one workstation to another in the factory and monitors if they are moving at the right speed through the assembly process.

I can remember the days when we had a flyer come by and they ask you 'have you seen this part?' and the part is 20 feet long and 10 feet high...

Rebassoo added that mobile technology will transform the factory floor of an aircraft manufacturing plant in the future.

He said: "My vision is that five or seven years from now, if you go in the factory, every employee is going to have some sort of mobile device, because all you need to do is save one trip back to where the information is, or one trip back to communicate with somebody, and you’ve proved, then, the cost of that device. The value of information is going to be that high, and the cost of that communications device is going to be that low."