BEIGEL PHONE: 760-633-3868

TECHNOLOGY FAX: 760-633-3819

SM CORPORATION E-MAIL: mike@[Link]

[Link] 308 VIA JULITA, ENCINITAS CA 92024

The following article, Exception Management for RFID Systems by Mike

Beigel, Samuel Marcus and Grant Ballard, was published in the most recent
IDTechEX Web Journal, Issue 36, January 2004, Smart Labels Analyst.

IT IS NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

Confidential 1 1/22/2004
 1

Issue 36 • January 2004

The IDTechEx Web Journal

Smart Labels Analyst

Website: [Link] Email: info@[Link]

10% discount before Jan 23, 2004

SMART LABELS USA 2004

Exception Management for RFID Systems

Report by Mike Beigel, Samuel Marcus and Grant Ballard,
Beigel Technology Corp
ContentsL ist

Exception Management for 1 “There’s an exception to every rule,” tion can only be achieved when the
RFID Systems
the saying goes. Unless your RFID sys- system design and implementation can
Guest Report by Mike Beigel,
Samuel Marcus and Grant tem can handle every exception you handle every possible situation.
Ballard, Beigel Technology
Corp
can’t build a fully automated system. So Many exceptions can be avoided
choose your rules carefully and design through the patient application of com-
Privacy Advocates With Blood 9
On Their Hands exception management techniques into mon sense. Taking time during the de-
your system. sign phase to anticipate what can go
METRO Group To Introduce 10
RFID Across The Company We assume that your new RFID project wrong and take it into account will
is useful and viable. The purpose of this result in a more robust system develop-

EPCglobal Selects VeriSign to 12

article is to help you make it more ro- ment and implementation phase. A
Provide Root Directory for bust through attention to exception man- RFID system designed to function un-
EPCglobal Network
agement. We use as examples some of der less than optimal conditions will
Checkpoint Systems Intro- 13 our experiences in designing, construct- outperform a system designed to take
duces EPC Solution Centre
ing, deploying, debugging and optimiz- the idealized case for granted. Princi-
The Self-adhesive Label Mar- 14 ing a RFID “penguin weighbridge” pro- ples like these are easy to advocate in
ket in Western Europe
ject in Antarctica starting in 1994. the abstract, but actually applying them
A techno-economic market
review Most marketing scenarios today would is another matter.
IDTechEx Events Calendar 22 paint a picture of RFID as a perfect tool
The IDTechEx Report Program 23 for automation, be the application inven- System Function Levels
on Smart Labels and Smart tory tracking, drive-through merchan-
Packaging
dise checkout, or supply chain manage- In this article we examine the design,
ment. A general sense of optimism per- creation and operation of RFID sys-
Smart Labels Analyst is writ- vades the field. However, this romanti- tems at differing levels corresponding
ten and produced for private cized view of the capabilities of RFID to project design and implementation.
circulation among subscrib- distracts from some hard realities en- The exceptions we examine will be
ers only, and may not be for-
warded to any third party, nor countered in building automated RFID categorized according to which levels
parts or all of any article re- systems that really work. Full automa-
produced, without prior per-
mission by IDTechEx Limited.
Continued >>
© IDTechEx Limited, 2004. Far Field House, Albert Road, Stow-cum-Quy, Cambridge CB5 9AR, UK.
Tel: + 44 1223 813703 Fax: + 44 1223 812400
 2

Smart Labels Analyst • Issue 36 • January 2004

Exception Management for RFID Systems (Cont)

they affect. infrastructure of the project- all the (e.g., technicians, customers) and
• Project Level: The explicit goals, components and subsystems and passive users (e.g., shipping pallets).
purposes, and functions of the sys- communications channels.
tem. • Hardware Level: A subset of the The RFID system and implementation
• Model Level: The manner in which System level, this deals with all the are proposed, developed, and deployed
the above purposes of the system physics and mechanics of running according to the assumptions based on
will be fulfilled and the ways in the RFID aspect of the system. It the categories above, and then the
which the system will be used. The includes RFID tags, readers, com- “fun” begins.
“world view” or paradigm of the puters, fixtures, etc.
system. • User Level: The range of possible Exceptions and Failure Modes
• System Level: The system is the data interactions between active users
Project Level Exceptions:
Exceptions occur on the Project Level
when performance expectations are
unrealistic or poorly defined, or when
communication between development
teams and management are inade-
quate. Errors in planning, the early
design phase, and in general problems
in the process of actually designing
and creating the system are all Project
Level exceptions. To avoid these prob-
lems it is important to use an open and
cautious approach to system design
and to make sure that everyone in-
volved in the project is aware of the
requirements and proposed design.

Model Level Exceptions:

Exceptions on the Model Level are
errors in the understanding of how the
system is going to work. Since the
model serves to define the reaction of
the system to any given situation, a
faulty model will lead to a system that
behaves incorrectly or erratically. The
only way to avoid Model exceptions is
to thoroughly analyze and test the
model and prototype systems before
Two penguins enter RFID weighbridge, causing multiple exceptions to RFID, full implementation.
direction tracking and weighing rules.
Source: Beigel Technology Corp
Continued >>
© IDTechEx Limited, 2004. Far Field House, Albert Road, Stow-cum-Quy, Cambridge CB5 9AR, UK.
Tel: + 44 1223 813703 Fax: + 44 1223 812400
 3

Smart Labels Analyst • Issue 36 • January 2004

Exception Management for RFID Systems (Cont)

System Level Exceptions: and can cause exceptions if they im- production and during operation. Of
Exceptions on the System Level are properly handle the system. Other us- course, it’s impossible to predict
hardware failures and design flaws. ers can be active (a customer) or pas- which exceptions will occur in order to
They can also occur when communi- sive (a shipping pallet), helpful or hos- catch them all, so exception handling
cations between components fails or tile (as when a shoplifter tries to cir- in the implementation and operation
there is miscommunication. Power cumvent store security), but any user phase is just as important as exception
outages, computer crashes, and any can cause exceptions which unpredict- prediction and reduction in the design
other sort of disruption in the process able action. These can be abated by phase.
are all common System Level excep- taking as wide a range of potential
tions. System exceptions can be partly user behaviour as possible into ac- Simple Examples Taught by
eliminated during the design phase count when designing the system. Penguins
with redundant and rugged engineer- In addition to the mundane sorts of
ing, and can be avoided somewhat issues that can come up during the In 1994 we were retained to design
during run-time by educating users on operation of a system, sometimes ex- and fabricate an automatic RFID based
the correct use of the system. traordinary adverse events occur. For system to track and weigh penguins as
some systems it will be important to they moved back and forth between
RFID Level Exceptions: be able to operate despite true disas- their nests on the beaches of Antarc-
The RFID subsystem is susceptible to ters: earthquakes, power outages, and tica and their aquatic feeding territo-
all the exceptions that can befall the even war. Disasters can disrupt both ries. By tracking the weight of tagged
system in general, as well as a another corporate and global infrastructure, penguins on the way to and from their
set of limitations and problems pecu- isolating key subsystems from the nests it would be possible to determine
liar to the field of RFID. RFID specific whole. If a system is vital then it must how much food they were taking back
problems tend to befall one of the ei- be equipped to handle such exotic ex- to their young, and to determine how
ther the tag or the tag reader, though ceptions as man-made and natural dis- long it took them to find this food. The
some problems like general interfer- asters. Exceptional circumstances need principles which guided the project are
ence or miscommunication affect both. not be fully fledged disasters; they can illustrative for any sort of tracking
The tags themselves may be lost or also take the form of extremely harsh system- whether it tracks shipping
misapplied, or their hardware compo- weather, excessive background RF pallets, customers, library books, or
nents may fail, ceasing function or radiation, and so forth. any set of objects.
corrupting data. The readers may be In short, an exception is what happens The plan was to find points the pen-
unable to read at some ranges, or be when events take circumstance outside guins had to travel through on their
unable to process more than a certain the realm of the expected system op- journeys and to place weighbridges—
number of tags at once. eration. By learning to anticipate and corridors with an assortment of built-
expect likely problems, the number of in sensors and RFID tag readers—at
User Exceptions: exceptions can be reduced. Actually these locations to monitor their move-
There are several types of user and fixing exceptions, on the other hand, ments. A penguin entering or leaving
each can cause exceptions, intention- requires analyzing the problem, creat- the corridor would trigger an optical
ally or not, by simply acting outside ing a solution and then implementing sensor, get weighed as it walked on an
the bounds of user behaviour predicted it. It is in general less expensive to electric scale, have its RFID tag
by the system designers. Operators and anticipate and eliminate an exception (which had been implanted previously)
technician administrating the system than to be forced to and handle it after
Continued >>
© IDTechEx Limited, 2004. Far Field House, Albert Road, Stow-cum-Quy, Cambridge CB5 9AR, UK.
Tel: + 44 1223 813703 Fax: + 44 1223 812400
 4

Smart Labels Analyst • Issue 36 • January 2004

Exception Management for RFID Systems (Cont)

read, and then trip a second optical RFID tags we needed to build special debugging and software re-design ses-
sensor (to confirm the direction they readers for the weighbridge. The pro- sion on-site in a tent pitched on thaw-
were heading) on its way out of the ject was a bit rushed, so the compo- ing penguin guano.
weighbridge. The weighbridge would nents were amassed, tested, and flown The design choice of a corridor was
process the data and then store it until to Antarctica to be assembled on-site. less than perfect to begin with—a sim-
downloaded by the scientists. It was a Since things were running late there ple hoop would have worked better in
simple plan and should have gone off was only time to test components indi- terms of RFID reading, but it was ini-
without a hitch. This meant, of course, vidually and it came as some surprise tially assumed that penguins would be
that we hit every stumbling block, when it turned out that the RFID too wary to walk through a hoop. After
conceivable or not, in Antarctica. reader field interfered with the optic four years of improving the system, it
sensors, a problem compounded by the was discovered by practical observa-
The Project Level impossibility of obtaining new parts in tion that penguins were more likely to
a remote site in Antarctica. go through a hoop than a corridor any-
Our project goal was to build corridors Since the system software was de- way, and the change in structure sig-
with and RFID tag reader, optic and pendent on the concurrent operation of nificantly increased the read rate for
weight sensors, and a microcomputer. the RFID reader and the optic sensors, the system. The component interfer-
Because we chose to use proprietary the only solution was an unforgiving Continued >>

Weighbridge test at Sea World: captive penguins don't act like wild penguins
Source: Beigel Technology Corp
Continued >>
© IDTechEx Limited, 2004. Far Field House, Albert Road, Stow-cum-Quy, Cambridge CB5 9AR, UK.
Tel: + 44 1223 813703 Fax: + 44 1223 812400
 5

Smart Labels Analyst • Issue 36 • January 2004

Exception Management for RFID Systems (Cont)

ence problem could have been easily venient and politically correct as it vent them from filling up, sometimes
avoided with thorough testing but it was, introduced power efficiency con- more than once a day.
was a rushed job and in the spirit of cerns not present in most “on-grid” Additionally, the weight calculating
getting it there on time it couldn’t be application. We switched to a slower, algorithms turned out to be far more
done. The second problem was a fun- low power microprocessor to analyze complicated than anyone had pre-
damental and probably unavoidable the incoming data, and we turned the dicted, which mean correspondingly
misapprehension by scientists, engi- reader off when the optical sensors complicated software, which became
neers and business people about the indicated a period of inactivity. A increasingly difficult to mange on the
“best mode” of system design. chain reaction of complications en- weaker processors. Ultimately, all data
sued. needed to be offloaded to full-fledged
The Model Level Because of the lower powered micro- personal computers and processed
processors, storage capacity and proc- after the fact.
The operation of the weighbridge essor speed were compromised. The Sometimes penguins would simply
seemed fairly straightforward. A pen- original design allowed ID, direction, squat in front of the optical sensors
guin would approach and enter the weight and time measurements to be and end up being read three or four
device from one side and walk straight made in real time. However, now the times, or they would trip one, turn
through and out the other. This would data analysis could not be performed around and wander off. The
in turn trigger an optical sensor, the in runtime without causing backlogs in weighbridge could only properly de-
RFID reader and scale, and the other the system, so the raw data had to be termine the direction of the penguin if
optical sensor, in order. Of course, the archived and then computed and ana- it hit each of the optical sensors, and
penguins didn’t have to do that, but we lyzed after the fact. This meant storage this caused some problems. The issue
saw no reasons for them not to. The issues as the solid state NVRAMs was basically fixed in software, where
reality of the situation couldn’t have were asked to hold more than they had the weighbridges were instructed to
been farther from our assumptions of originally been intended to, and re- ignore events outside a specific set of
course and so our system, which was quired a higher frequency of data complete event profiles. If need was
basically a concrete implementation of downloading by the scientists to pre- present, humans could go back and
how we had built our model, needed look at the records with some hope of
extensive reworking on site. As is reconstructing the anomalous events,
typical of the model level, the prob- but there were more than enough valid
lems that these misunderstandings readings to make up for the loss of this
caused actually occurred on other lev-
IDTechEx and Pira minority (helped by the fact that in this
International to Host the 2nd
els, confounding the RFID system and scenario one valid read was fundamen-
Intelligent & Smart
requiring hardware changes. tally as good as any other—in a differ-
Packaging USA 2004
Conference ent setting this fix would not have
The Systems Level worked).
27-28 January 2004
Because of the remote locations of the Optional Workshop The RFID Level
penguin colonies and the 24 hours of 26 January
sunlight during the study period, we
The Hilton Hotel, What happens when two penguins
Las Vegas, USA
opted to use solar panels to power the cross the bridge at the same time?
weighbridges. Using solar power, con-
Continued >>
© IDTechEx Limited, 2004. Far Field House, Albert Road, Stow-cum-Quy, Cambridge CB5 9AR, UK.
Tel: + 44 1223 813703 Fax: + 44 1223 812400
 6

Smart Labels Analyst • Issue 36 • January 2004

Exception Management for RFID Systems (Cont)

What if a penguin’s tag isn’t read all. A penguin with a broken tag just try and read two tags at once, were
properly or just doesn’t work? This shifted to this category, ultimately to more complicated. Since the RFID tag
second problem is less an issue than be replaced with the tagging of a new reader had been reprogrammed to in-
the first, since it was impossible to tag penguin. Other problems like tag mis- terrogate the tags in rapid pulses it
the entire population anyway- the ma- reads and the “two headed penguin” could usually determine which two
jority of the penguins had no tags at when the weighbridge was forced to penguins were crossing (if both had
tags) but it was difficult to determine
their weights individually. To a certain
extent this could be resolved by manu-
ally going back through the data, but it
was easier, as in the case of the squat-
ting penguins, to ignore nonstandard
event profiles. Again, it was the nature
of the project that allowed this solu-
tion. It would be quite unwise to im-
plement a similar workaround in any
system where users could be expected
to be antagonistic, or where even a
single event-loss would not be accept-
able.

The User Level

By far the aspect of the project for

which we were least prepared was the
penguins themselves. The engineers
knew very little penguin psychology,
we had no idea what to expect from
them. The scientists knew penguin
behaviour very well but not in the con-
text of the new weighbridge setup. On
some level somewhere we took it as
granted that penguins would queue up
to walk through the weighbridge in a
calm and orderly fashion. This was
completely unfounded. A penguin
would walk halfway through the
bridge, change its mind and walk back
the way it came, yielding half com-
plete data. Some penguins would cross
Corridor weighbridge works, but RFID performance is marginal so quickly that only partial reads could
Source: Beigel Technology Corp

© IDTechEx Limited, 2004. Far Field House, Albert Road, Stow-cum-Quy, Cambridge CB5 9AR, UK.
Tel: + 44 1223 813703 Fax: + 44 1223 812400
 7

Smart Labels Analyst • Issue 36 • January 2004

Exception Management for RFID Systems (Cont)

be taken. Others would cross so slowly the simplest matter. Replacement parts at a time or be used to locate an object
that other penguins would start and can’t be easily found nearby and there in space. Like the barcode revolution,
finish crossing in the meantime. We are only certain times in which un- RFID has potential to increase effi-
didn’t know in advance that the floor trained personnel should visit the con- ciency (of tracking inventory, pur-
of the weighbridge was hard for pen- tinent. chases, location, etc) by eliminating
guins to walk on and had to be covered the need for a human to deal with
with a mat. We were lucky in that every unit being tracked. Rather, they
As we observed the the penguin project just wave a RFID reader at a pile of
behaviour we began continued over a long goods (or in a more idealized model,
system design changes,
“The problem with enough time to find and the goods are read automatically as
from complex elec- this utopian vision of iron out many of the they pass through a door, for instance)
tronic or software RFID is that it’s just technical wrinkles. and the miracle of RFID handles the
modifications to physi- Every year between the rest. It seems that the future is indeed
not that simple”
cal changes to the nesting seasons we only a few years away.
weighbridge setup and were able to evaluate The problem with this utopian vision
apparatus. In order to our results. We could of RFID is that it’s just not that sim-
control the speed at which the pen- modify our hardware and software, ple. To replace barcodes with RFID
guins made the crossing, we placed and then work in the field during nest- tags actually means adding to potential
bamboo sticks low across the en- ing season to observe the results of our problems, not eliminating them. This
trances to the bridge. Like speed efforts, make adjustments on-location, is because everything that can go
bumps, the sticks forced the penguins and once again plan for improvement. wrong with a barcode can go wrong
to slow down to hop over, and this The first deployment was one with a RFID tag, and the RFID system
resulted in more accurate weighing. weighbridge in December of 1994, and itself will have additional idiosyncratic
the completion of three optimized de- problems to deal with. True- RFID
Special Circumstances ployed systems was accomplished by does not require line-of-sight. There is
1998. The system is still in use by the a popular misconception, however,
Antarctica is an inhospitable environ- scientists in Antarctica. that a RFID tag within a reader’s range
ment. Intense cold and high winds will automatically be read. Rather this
dominate the area. The cables and con- Large Scale Implications of RFID is a probabilistic event, dependent on
nectors we used at first simply weren’t System Implementation the conditions and a variety of sce-
robust enough to withstand the tem- nario parameters (in much the same
perature extremes and corrosive cli- A RFID system offers several key way that a barcode may not be read
mate at the nest areas. The light sen- advantages over a barcode system. properly even if it is in line-of-sight).
sors also had to cope with the extreme Unlike a barcode, a RFID reader does The ability to read more than one tag
seasonal variations in lighting condi- not need line-of-sight with its tags. at a time also increases the time it
tions that could make it difficult to Each tag can potentially hold more takes to read each individual tag sig-
determine just when the sensor was information than a barcode, and this nificantly.
actually detecting a penguin passing in information need not be read-only; the Like a barcode, a RFID tag may be
front of it and when the result was an flow of data may be in more than one incorrect or misread- but it’s not being
artefact of the lighting. And of course, direction. A RFID reader can also read by a human who knows that the
on-site maintenance in Antarctica isn’t communicate with more than one tag can of tomatoes they just scanned isn’t

© IDTechEx Limited, 2004. Far Field House, Albert Road, Stow-cum-Quy, Cambridge CB5 9AR, UK.
Tel: + 44 1223 813703 Fax: + 44 1223 812400
 8

Smart Labels Analyst • Issue 36 • January 2004

Exception Management for RFID Systems (Cont)

a bottle of bleach. A RFID system tion a fully automated RFID system in stances and rules. Machines cannot at
ultimately has no way to check if there a store near you. this time improvise, and so they can
has been a mislabelling or misreading Even self checkout, a presently imple- never deal with the full spectrum of
short of human intervention, and if a mented intermediate stage between the possible exceptions in an automatic
supermarket RFID checkout operates now standard barcode checkout proc- way. Any system which is going to
transparently as customers leave the ess and a ‘walk-thru’ system has its function under all circumstances will
store they may never get a chance to problems. Clerks are still required to need human elements included to take
correct the bill. Additionally a RFID be on-hand in case something won’t over when automation collides with
tag, like a barcode, may fail to read scan or a customer doesn’t understand exception. Human supervision and
entirely and thus requires a clerk on the complicated instructions for scan- occasional intervention is still neces-
hand to step in and take control. And ning, weighing, and bagging their mer- sary for automated systems, and our
because we ask RFID to perform more chandise. If check-out proceeds with- recognition of this will enable a more
than we do of barcodes, it presents out a hitch the clerk still needs to ver- robust path of growth towards the
more potential failure modes. Signal ify that everything was paid for. large scale RFID systems we envision.
interference, unsavoury customers For every step of a process in which
using electromagnetic shielding to foil we replace human operators with auto- Making Robust Systems
the system in some way, and impor- mation, we reduce the process’ ability
tantly a number of unresolved privacy to cope with situations beyond some There is no simple solution to making
issues stand ready to prevent the crea- predefined set of assumptions, circum- a truly robust automated system, but to
close we present a few key suggestions
to help with the development of yours.

• Study the problem your system aims

to solve. Observe the situation be-
fore making conclusions about its
nature.
• Time and money spent up-front de-
velop and refinement of the model
and system design will save even
more time and money later.
• It is absolutely crucial to test as
much as possible before deployment.
• Dedicate a team to start-to-finish
system engineering, development,
and optimization.
• Prepared for human intervention in
system operation during develop-
ment.
• The system automation will evolve
Hoop-coil weighbridge optimizes RFID reading by respecting from the interactive process of its
physics and penguin behaviour use.
Source: Beigel Technology Corp

© IDTechEx Limited, 2004. Far Field House, Albert Road, Stow-cum-Quy, Cambridge CB5 9AR, UK.
Tel: + 44 1223 813703 Fax: + 44 1223 812400