Reliability assessment of RFID reader through prognostics and health management

Obtaining real-time information during the shipping process is important in enhancing turnover effectiveness. An RFID system is an emerging product that provides a solution and requires long term operation. This is a concern since a failure may cause losses such as line stoppages or delays in stocking and shipping. This study investigates the reliability of the RFID reader through prognostics and health management. An accelerated life test is conducted to reduce the time and cost required for the experiment. The correlation of the output power and the product performance (read rate) is verified, so the output power can be used as the performance index to judge the health of the product at any given moment. This research employs a threefold cross-validation for the output power discrepancy to determine the optimal warning parameters. Desired null/alternative hypothesis tests are established for subsequent SPRT testing to verify the degradation of the mean of the power discrepancy for the unhealthy data. An alarm is then sent to warn the user that the RFID product will soon fail to meet the requirement of the 100% read rate.