Some while ago MIT organized a very interesting event on Auto-ID and how it can be used to improve supply chain. The lectures were all great and covered many industries and organizations: From Universities to standard bodies, from aircraft sector to auto-makers.

Below you can see the system architecture proposed by EPFL (The whole slides can be found here), a well-known university in Switzerland which has been applied by FIAT. Instead of using pure RFID for the purpose of monitoring, they have done another thing:




The idea has been to add a component to cars as another part of the product which can store data related to the car. The component can also be used as an embedded product life cycle Management enabler. I think the idea is easily applicable to many types of products such as heavy equipment, industrial parts and so forth.