In the early days of 2011, Fujitsu and Boeing collaborated to establish an alliance of RFID technology and contact memory button (CMB) technology for maintaining aircraft operations. The partnership of Fujitsu and Boeing bought an innovative facet of RFID technology for the aviation industry. The deployment of RFID systems in the aircraft field allows the airlines to make everything automatic through device identification, equipment readers, software applications, deployment service and smart system architecture.
Fujitsu helps the Boeing to tailor their globally-shared architecture according to customer’s needs. Integration of RFID solutions in the aircraft environment enables the Boeing to lower their operational costs as RFID technology permits them to reduce inventory, human errors and manual blunders without the instalment of new processes.
The retrofitting of the RFID system to the existing systems of Boeing will help the aviation operators to manage their airline components, aviation materials and equipment with computerized identification techniques or devices. The integration creates automated database management and improves visibility across the maintenance department.
When Boeing experts attach RFID tags to their aircraft components starting from the manufacturing step, it becomes easy for aviation experts to monitor all the aircraft components individually, acquire precise traceability and boost the productivity of the aircraft maintenance operations. RFID Integrated Solutions designed by Fujitsu laboratories used two different technologies for storing and recovering data of aviation components and parts such as;
- Low-memory RFID:The capacity of these devices ranges from 512-bit to 1-kilobyte to store configuration, attendance, privacy and serviceability information, including but not limited to the serial number, manufacturing date, expiry date and aeroplane location.
- High-memory RFID:The capacity of these devices ranges from 8-kilobytes to 4-gigabytes to store point-of-sale lifecycle information related to a component, part or section used in an aeroplane such as birth record, existing record, maintenance details and scratchpad section.
By considering the need of airline operations during the development procedure, the initial deployment of RFID solutions focused only five areas; Emergency equipment management, Rotables management, Repairable management, Structural repair and airframe degradation management, and Required cabin items.
With Fujitsu’s RFID system deployment, Boeing knows each detail of their airline components and records them accurately. While supplying these airline components to other airlines, Boeing also gives them a component list, known as Aircraft Readiness Log (ARL) which works as a configuration list. This configuration list allows the other airlines to operate aircraft components securely because their deployment demands strict configuration and management of components. The digital management of aircraft components and automated generation of ARL improves the task efficiency, limits the human error by cutting down the number of hours required to record component details manually.
Another valuable use of digitized ARL is that airlines can repair components in a timely fashion or repair faults before experiencing challenges. Accurate traceability, high visibility and instant support are the other promising benefits of ARL.
RFID label/tag developed by Fujitsu Laboratories meets the SAE AS5678 standard which explains tolerance specifications of atmosphere required by the aerospace industry and follows the ATA Spec 2000, which defines the data format of RFID technology. Boeing adopted RFID label integrated with these standards in the year 2012. After adopting automated identification technology and highly rated standards, Boeing became as one of the successful airline company and promising partner of Fujitsu.
