Radio-frequency identification of products is one possible tool to combat theft, and the technology performed well in a new feasibility study on its use as a potential sales-floor theft-deterrent system. The study, conducted by researchers in the RFID Research Center at the University of Arkansas, demonstrated RFID’s usefulness in several shoplifting scenarios, including many items moving through a security/reader portal at a high rate of speed and many items stuffed into a “booster bag,” a traditional shopping bag lined with aluminum foil.

Bill Hardgrave, director of the research center and professor of information systems in the Sam M. Walton College of Business, announced the findings Sept. 10 at a two-day forum on item-level RFID hosted by the research center, the Voluntary Interindustry Commerce Solutions Association and the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals.

“The most interesting data came from scenarios involving the booster bag and testers running through portals with many items,” Hardgrave said. “These scenarios included many multiple RFID tags, and we were able to obtain a great deal of information at the entry/exit portal.”

Researchers tested two types of ultra-high frequency, generation 2 RFID tags in various baseline and shoplifting scenarios. The tests involved comparisons to two conventional systems, acousto-magnetic and low-level radio-frequency electronic article surveillance, currently used in many retail stores.

In the baseline tests, the researchers experimented with various tag locations and orientations as the tags moved through portal readers. In each test, the RFID system performed as well as or better than the conventional systems. The specific strength of RFID, as demonstrated in the baseline tests, was its ability to capture individual tags at various locations and orientations. Perhaps more importantly, the RFID technology recorded the total number of individual tags, while the other technologies simply noted the presence of any tag in the read field.

“Because RFID can uniquely identify individual tags, it can provide information on the number of stolen items within a bag or the number of items held by a shoplifter,” Hardgrave said. “Conventional systems cannot uniquely identify individual tags, which means they can report only one item in a bag that may have 20 or 50 stolen items.