Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Journal of Antennas and Propagation Volume 2013, Article ID 916526, 9 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/916526 Research Article Exploring the Limitations on RFID Technology in Traceability Systems at Beverage Factories Isabel Expósito and Iñigo Cuiñas Departamento de Teor´ ıa do Sinal e Comunicaci´ ons, Universidade de Vigo, 36310 Vigo, Spain Correspondence should be addressed to I˜ nigo Cui˜ nas; inhigo@uvigo.es Received 27 March 2013; Revised 1 June 2013; Accepted 5 June 2013 Academic Editor: Luca Catarinucci Copyright © 2013 I. Exp´ osito and I. Cui˜ nas. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Te application of RFID in traceability of products in beverage factories is analyzed in terms of the electromagnetic conditions defned by the massive presence of metallic elements and liquids. Various experiments are reported to determine the maximum reading range from RFID tags installed on tanks or to read RFID information around bottles, both empty and full of wine, trying to put in context the possible problems that could appear when installing an RFID-based traceability system within a winery, a brewery, or any other beverage factory. 1. Introduction During last years, the development of radio frequency identi- fcation (RFID) technologies has been fast and their applica- tions grow in parallel to the reduction of costs [1]. A lot of companies and even some European projects proposed the use of RFID technology to build full traceability systems, sub- stituting barcodes in some applications but extending the functionalities to the complete production chain [2–4]. Te development of international standards, such as EPC global [5], has given an additional impulse to further spread this technology. Reading some reports, it would seem that the RFID is the solution for all traceability problems. Te reason to propose the use of this technology for traceability purposes is that it allows the unequivocal identifcation of each agent along a production chain (machines, containers, products, and even operators) and a fast and accurate registration of all of them when being involved at each step of the process. Tus, the reconstruction of a product history becomes no more than a query at the database storing all the data previously col- lected in the factory. Te wide diversity of tags available in the market allows the use of RFID in a large range of applications. Tags could even be printed directly to the fnal product by means of inkjet-printing technology [6]. Passive RFID tags are the most used tracing systems due to their lower cost, especially at item level. Several frequencies are also available. Te choice of the frequency will depend on the requirements of the appli- cations (required reading range, environmental conditions, multitag reading, etc.). Te development of an RFID-based traceability system in a beverage factory (wine, liquors, sodas, etc.) presents some technical challenges due to the special considered environ- ments: large metallic tanks, liquids, glass bottles, and so forth, all of them electromagnetic unfriendly elements. But the developments of such system could lead to improved benefts associated with reduction of time expenses, reduction of errors, and accuracy of the information. Te objective of this paper is not only to present an implementation of an RFID- based traceability and its advantages but also to isolate and evaluate the possible limitations due to the presence of liquid and metallic elements. Te paper is organized as follows. Afer this introduction, a brief description of related works occupies Section 2. Section 3 is centered on the guidelines of a complete trace- ability system based on RFID technology. Ten, the detection and analysis of limitations for RFID operation due to the environment characteristics are the focus of Section 4, which is followed by the Conclusions section.