Trolley tracking

RFiD Discovery's Trolley Tracking system improves the management of luggage trolleys at airports and in other travel environments.

Benefits

Optimises utilisation of trolleys

Faster trolley collection thanks to visibility of understocked areas

Trolley pool size can be optimised to reduce capital expenditure and associated maintenance costs

Builds a maintenance history for each trolley

Airports are doing what they can to attract more passengers through their gates. The more passengers that pass through an airport, the greater the airport's revenue. Many factors will affect an individual's choice of airport, one of which will be the overall customer experience and the availability of trolleys is seen by many as a good indicator of how well an airport is taking care of them.

Providing trolleys in the right place at the right time can significantly enhance customer experience

RFiD Discovery is a low-cost, high impact solution to support trolley management teams, ensuring trolley availability across the airport estate. Fitting trolleys with an RFiD Discovery system supports the efficient management of trolleys by monitoring the build-up, dispersal, and flow of trolleys around the airport to provide a live view of trolley availability and real-time alerts of trolley shortages.

By highlighting areas where trolleys are left, it supports efficient retrieval or redistribution. The system also delivers valuable data about customer movements in the terminal by recording the total time spent in retail stores or other particular areas.

In addition, individually identifying trolleys enables organisations to build a history of utilisation including the number of trips or approximate distance travelled and detect any under or over usage of particular carts. It also helps determine whether there are too many trolleys and if the pool size can be reduced.

How does trolley tracking work?

Each trolley is fitted with a tracking tag (either passive RFID, BLE or UWB), which is discretely placed so that it is protected from trolley contents and users remain unaware of it. Passive RFID tags do not have batteries and do not need to be maintained.

Suitable readers and antennas are installed at trolley collection points and other areas where they tend to be left as well as significant gateways such as entrance doors.

Information collected by the readers is sent back to the central RFiD Discovery database which can be interfaced with other systems to create alerts or provide data for analysis.

Pilot project to track trolleys at Heathrow

RFiD Discovery has successfully completed a three-month pilot project to track the movements of luggage trolleys at Heathrow Airport to improve trolley management and demand forecasting.

At the heart of the project was the monitoring of trolley movements into and out of the baggage reclaim area at the airport’s terminal 4. Having established that the solution provides the desired data, Heathrow is now looking at how to roll out the solution across its terminals.

For the pilot project, each of the approximately 2,000 trolleys at terminal 4 were fitted with a passive RFID label, placed so that it was protected from trolley contents and users remained unaware of it. RFID readers were installed at all entrances and exits to the baggage reclaim area to detect if any trolleys entered or left the area.

"Providing trolleys in the right place at the right time can significantly enhance passenger experience. The data collected by the system will enable our forecasting teams to improve modelling tools, so the replenishment process can be planned more effectively. In addition, live data of stock levels will warn the trolley management teams if trolley numbers in key areas are getting low."

Ben Wagenaar, Innovation Technologist at Heathrow