Application of Huawei's RFID transceiver separation technology in smart warehouse management

Explanation of warehouse entry and exit scenarios

1.1 Scene description and comparison

Warehousing management is to use modern digital technology to complete the effective identification and monitoring of warehouse goods entering and exiting the warehouse, as well as the verification of cargo orders and goods.

In a general scenario, trucks load goods that need to be managed and arrive at the warehouse door. The process comparison between the traditional warehousing solution and the RFID solution is as follows:

In the traditional solution, after the truck arrives at the warehouse door, it needs to unload the goods on the spot. The administrator holds a scanner gun to identify the goods, and only after comparing and checking the goods, the warehousing operation starts, which lasts about x hours.

Under the RFID solution, after the deployment is completed, the goods are directly unloaded and put into storage. Automatic verification can be done once storage is completed, eliminating the steps of unloading inventory and manual scanning.

1.2 RFID solution end-side deployment design

Under RFID end-side technology, wireless radio frequency can solve the excitation and signal recognition of RFID tags, but the core problem lies in how to judge the entry and exit direction of completed goods.

Wireless radio frequency is divergent, and its antenna excitation signal can be abstracted into a sector. Within the sector covered by the antenna, RFID tags may be excited and identified. However, it is impossible to create a sense of "direction" by just relying on a fan shape. Entering the fan-shaped coverage area from any direction will be recognized. Therefore, it is impossible to complete the identification of whether the goods enter or leave the warehouse door. We can only know whether the goods are moved around the warehouse door. Recognized.

Based on the theory that two points determine a straight line, we solve the problem of determining the direction of cargo identification by deploying a radio frequency identifier (helper) inside and outside the warehouse door.

Understandably, if a piece of goods with an RFID tag is first excited by the helper on the outside of the warehouse door, and then by the helper on the inside, we think that the goods have been put into storage in this short period of time; if the goods are first stimulated by the helper on the inside of the warehouse door, The helper motivates, and then is stimulated by the outer helper, which is considered to be an outbound operation.

Under Huawei's RFID transceiver separation technology, helper devices need to be deployed inside and outside the warehouse door or channel to stimulate RFID tags.

The receiver device is deployed in a larger area and is responsible for receiving the signal stimulated by the RFID tag to identify and obtain useful information.

Difficulties in entry and exit scenarios

2.1 Large amount of data

The RFID device emits radio waves to excite the tag, and there are differences in intensity in the specified frequency band. In order to cover a larger identification range, the intensity of the radio frequency will generally be appropriately increased to ensure that RFID tags are stimulated a sufficient number of times and redundant tags are scanned to improve accuracy. Therefore, during the passage of goods, the number of signals sensed by the tag is very large.

The general warehousing scenario is to solve the problem of manual efficiency. There will be a lot of goods identified at the same time, and there will be a lot of labels, so the amount of data will increase exponentially.

2.2 Data cleaning and analysis

The real model of warehouse entry and exit management on the equipment side is that the RFID tag is scanned by the RFID Reader at a certain moment, and what our business focuses on is actually that the goods are recognized by the warehouse door at a certain moment. RFID tag data needs to be converted into cargo data, and RFID identification needs to be converted into facilities associated with RFID readers, such as entry and exit gates.

On the other hand, as shown in the figure above, the complete delivery/receipt of goods is analyzed by multiple RFID scanning events. It needs to be scanned by the RFID reader and writer, and is eventually scanned by the RFID reader and writer, resulting in a stable Only state changes can be analyzed. And in actual situations, Inhelper and OutHelper will have cross coverage, and their state transformation is not linear, requiring a more complex analysis algorithm to realize the in and out state transformation.

Finally, when there are multiple warehouse doors in parallel, the doors may even interfere with each other's scanning. The same cargo label will be scanned by Door 1 and Door 2, making it easy to determine abnormal events in and out of multiple doors. data.

How to use IOT platform to solve

3.1 Equipment access service

Solve the RECEIVER access platform, use the massive data uplink and high concurrency capabilities to solve the problem of large data upload, and realize real-time upload of data for subsequent use of analysis modules.

3.2 Data analysis services

Quickly connect to device access services, and can naturally obtain device data and perform effective analysis.

The Asset modeling module can be used to complete the cleaning and conversion of equipment data; real-time stream analysis jobs can be used to complete filtering, denoising, and status reasoning of RFID data to achieve access analysis and generate event data. And the real-time stream analysis job can support the docking of various output components, such as DIS data access service (kafka), such as SMN message push service (can push text messages and emails), etc.

In addition, data analysis services can provide capabilities such as real-time analysis and offline analysis, helping users complete basic statistics and big data analysis capabilities of IoT data, such as reports on the total number of goods entering and exiting the warehouse door every day.

After the equipment side networking is completed, the helper stimulates the cargo tags within the coverage area, and the receiver device is responsible for collecting the signals generated after the RFID tags are stimulated in the field, and connects to the industrial computer through the serial port. Use the supporting program on the industrial computer and integrate the IOT Device SDK to convert the RFID signal from a hexadecimal message into json, then connect to the IOT platform device access service and report the data.

At the IOT platform layer, the device access service is responsible for the accounting and management of devices and receives device data; the data analysis service performs data conversion and analysis.

The data analysis service can analyze the original data into event data and pass it to message middleware such as DIS service, and the upper-layer application consumes the event data to complete the corresponding business.

Conclusion

The above is the analysis and design of the entry and exit scenarios in warehousing management based on RFID + IOT technology. Next, we will introduce in detail how to use IOT technology for access, modeling, and algorithm analysis to achieve data cleaning and event analysis.