The commercial border crossing procedure is an integral part of today's cross-national transportation and supply chain system. It can greatly influence the trade and economy in the region. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology has demonstrated great benefits to the supply chain. In the border crossing context, RFID can be employed as a key-enabling technology to help reduce smuggling, ensure secured transportation, and improve the flow of traffic at the border link. Some white papers and government reports make proclamations on how RFID technology can benefit the border crossing process, but most of the claims are based on intuition and lack empirical and model-based analysis. This paper studies the border crossing procedure at one of the business border link between Hong Kong and Mainland China. An RFID-enabled fast border crossing lane, namely "green lane" is proposed. A large set of GPS data record of sample trucks crossing the border over a 9-month period is captured. A queueing model is constructed based on the data. Simulation is run under current procedure and RFID-enabled procedure and results are compared. This paper contributes to the research community by demonstrating how the adoption of RFID in border crossing can actually turn into operational benefits in terms of time savings at border link, inventory savings and other returns.
