Applications of EPICS in food supply chain management

I'm presenting at the workshop Applications of EPICS in food supply chain management in Oslo 16. November. This workshop is based around the work done by SINTEF Fisheries and Aquaculture, Matis and TraceTracker (where I work) in the eTrace project. I hope to see you there if you are interested in the use of EPCIS for applications like traceability, sustainability, logistics optimization and supply chain management!

Dual RFID tags in Pack & Sea's fish crates

Recently I participated on a project that sought to create traceability on fish caught in Swedish waters. While we affixed GRAI RFID tags to fish crates on the go (this was a pilot), we also observed some of the characteristic green fish crates from Pack & Sea. So we decided to try if our standard RFID readers could read these as well.

Reading those fish crates turned out to be no problem. But to our surprise each of the crates from Pack & Sea contained two RFID tags, with different identities. So if we had a stack of, say, 10 crates and one was from Pack & Sea, then we would read 11 identifiers.

This seemed very impractical in harbors where fish crates from a number of sources may be used on the same vessel. So to avoid having different routines for the presence of such crates, we decided to avoid them.

Actually, I do not think it is according to EPCglobal's guidelines to have use two identities in this way.