chrispeng [ad_1]
The 15th Circuit Court of the Florida Inspectorate is now using passive RFID tags and real-time location systems to track thousands of serious documents processed by the court each year.
The 15th Circuit has always had difficulty tracking existing documents of serious cases. In this 45,000-square-foot, four-story building, documents often circulate between different departments and offices. Circuit courts usually consider prosecuting 120,000 cases within a year, of which 18,000 cases are sent to the office for review and processing each year. At least half of these 18,000 documents are plea bargaining or arrest warrants for the arrest of fugitive criminals; the other half is left in the court for processing. These documents must go through several steps in the case processing and be transferred between departments and offices.
When lawyers request a certain document, they often find it difficult to trace the location of the document, “not because the document was placed incorrectly, but because no one can determine where the document is in the process.” State Inspection Office According to Dan Zinn, CIO of the 15th Circuit.
RFID document tracking
In July of this year, the court began to install InnerWireless’s real-time positioning system, ThingMagic Mercury5 reader and Zebra Technologies RFID label printing and encoding machine. According to Zin, the programming and reading capabilities of the RFID label printing and encoding machine are consistent with the ThingMagic reader.
The real-time positioning system includes PanGo Platform middleware, which gathers the ID number of the RFID tag obtained by the reader, and then calculates the location of the document and the channel for sending this information to the office document tracking software STAC. After logging in to STAC, the staff can locate the file on the map of the building by pressing the button twice. The system can locate the floor and office where the file is located, and the time at that location.In addition, the system can also list all the file boxes in a specific area, so that the staff can find more information about a certain file along the way.
In order to identify the documents, the 15th Circuit attaches a 1 inch * 4 inch paper label to each document, with Alien Technology’s EPC Gen 2 RFID inlay embedded in the label. “The label size is suitable for the document and will not cause any inconvenience to the staff.” Zinn said.
Many real-time positioning systems use active RFID tags, but the PanGo system can simultaneously obtain location information from active 2.45 GHz Wi-Fi tags (compliant with IEEE 802.11 b/g standards) and passive UHF tags (based on EPCglobal and ISO standards) . The positioning system includes a “location source providing tool”, a software that can receive location information from different sources (such as active and passive tags). The system also uses a location engine-receiving signals (sources include Wi-Fi active tags) via standard wireless networks and other wireless systems (such as Cisco Aironet). “Although we use a real-time positioning system with active tags, this system is a general tracking system that can also work with passive tags,” said Richard Barnwell Barnwell, product development VP of Richard InnerWireless.
The real-time positioning system was officially launched in September this year. At present, several readers are installed in the case receiving room, mail sending room, and entrance and exit of the building on the first floor; about 12 readers are installed in the crime team office on the third floor; 4 readers are installed in the criminal investigation office on the fourth floor Reader. Each reader is generally equipped with two antennas, several of which are equipped with three. “Two antennas per reader is conservative, each reader can use up to 4 lines, but we currently have no plans to use four antennas,” Zinn said.
Ultimately, the court hopes to increase the accuracy of location information by installing more readers. The tag reading distance is about 20 feet, and the antenna is installed at all entry points of the crime team and places where a large number of people enter and exit. “The reading rate in these places is 95%. The only problem we found is that when multiple files are put together in a box, some files will be missed when they are far from the antenna. This problem was discovered from the very beginning. We hope to solve this problem by increasing the number of antennas. The employees are also aware of the current reading problem and have also taken some measures to separate the files in the file box.” Zinn said.
On the first day this positioning system was adopted, the staff successfully located an important document that was about to be used in court.
This incident shows the importance of real-time positioning systems. Searching and locating files is very time-consuming, and employees can use the time saved to deal with more important tasks. If the file is not found, the outcome of the case will be greatly affected.
Zinn said that the real-time positioning system is expected to recoup the return on investment within a year. Now the court also plans to embed the EPC Gen 2 tag in the badge of each employee, so that the system can track not only the location of the document, but also all the people who handle it. The plan will be formally implemented in January next year.
More and more organizations are using RFID to track files, most of which use passive 13.56 MHz tags. The Austrian bank Hypo Landesbank Vorarlberg (HLV) adopted Thax Software’s Findentity RFID tracking system four years ago. The 7th Circuit Court in Prince George County, Maryland uses FileTrail’s EPC Gen 2 UHF RFID program to track 30,000-40,000 boxes of documents per year.
[ad_2]
