This paper discusses asset challenges detection in the healthcare industry, specifically delays and inaccuracies in asset monitoring caused by suboptimal RFID polling methods. The research question is how to determine an appropriate RFID polling interval that balances asset location accuracy, reader energy consumption, and network response time. Due to the increasing risk of mismanagement and equipment loss, an efficient approach is needed to improve asset-tracking accuracy. This study proposes a simulation-based multi-objective optimization approach by determining the optimal polling period to minimize network delay, reader energy consumption, and false identifications. Monte Carlo simulation models the stochastic movement of assets to evaluate system performance under different polling strategies. The results of one experiment showed that 100 assets, with an average moving rate of 2.48, reached the optimal scanning period of 1460 minutes. Additional experiments were conducted to analyze the sensitivity of the optimal polling interval to changes in asset population and movement rates. The contribution of this study is the development of a holistic model to determine the optimal scanning time to improve asset-tracking accuracy and reduce operational costs in RFID systems. Although evaluated in a healthcare context, the proposed framework is versatile and can also be used for other RFID-based asset monitoring scenarios with similar trade-offs.
Suakanto et al. (Fri,) studied this question.