Innovative Production Machines and Systems Conference

RFID is becoming a much more powerful technology and being adopted in supply chains and logistics industries, and now it begins to be applied in manufacturing industry. But how to build a framework of the application and analyse the benefits of application quantitatively is still a challenge. In this paper, RFID technology is critically reviewed with respect to its technological basics. The constraints in a conventional manufacturing system are analysed. A framework for the RFID based manufacturing system is proposed. ProModel software is used as a modelling and simulation tool to simulate the role of RFID in a typical manufacturing system. A case study on gear manufacturing is presented to evaluate the benefits by adopting RFID technology comparing to the conventional manufacturing system in terms of the cost distribution and time utilization. As a result of the improvement the cost of processing was redistributed by the same amount. The study illustrates an 8.39% improvement by implementing RFID technology in the system.