WSN and RFID integrated solution for advanced safety systems in industrial plants

The Smart Factory concept has been enabled in the last few years thanks to both Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) technologies. Although the two technologies have been adopted in isolation in factory automation applications, their partial integration start to be considered in different research fields. In this work, we propose a fully integrated approach between RFID and WSN targeted to develop an advanced safety system in industrial plants. By integrating RFID tags and readers in WSN nodes the developed system extends sensing capabilities, efficiency and pervasiveness of the WSN solutions already installed in the factory plant, while allowing a safety access to dangerous areas under the requirement that safety equipments are adopted. The paper presents both hardware and software solutions developed as well as performance evaluation results, in terms of system response time and energy consumption reduction, in a real testbed.