Ultra Wide Band Indoor Positioning System: analysis and testing of an IPS technology

Due to their current operating context, all logistics processes, from the simplest to the most complex ones, are facing always more interesting challenges in terms of management of a huge variety of products and, at the same time, strict lead times. In such a framework, it turns out that logistics inevitably has to aim at avoiding or, at least, reducing, all the possible inefficiencies that could emerge during the execution of the various activities that are needed to deliver a required product to a customer. These inefficiencies could be, among others, delays in the searching of the needed product code within a warehouse, errors in the retrieval or in the picking of an item, waste of time for carts or for operators’ travelling activity, lack of availability of warehouse facilities and devices due to failures and breakdowns. Of course, the overcome of the inefficiencies has to pass through the retrieval of the information that can be useful to increase the awareness of such existing lacks. For example, it would be important to have the data related to the movements of resources and to objects handling. In this paper, an innovative indoor positioning system is presented. Based on a real-time indoor location technology using Ultra Wide Band, it can be used for having an effective overview of a logistic system. After an introduction of the possible technologies for indoor positioning and tracking, the configuration of the system is showed, together with a description of a simple test and of an industrial application. The reported examples highlight some preliminary insights about the system accuracy and its applicability.