Ensuring the visibility and traceability of items through logistics chain of automotive industry based on AutoEPCNet Usage

Traceability in logistics is the capability of the participants to trace the products throughout the supply chain by means of either the product and/or container identifiers in a forward and/or backward direction. In today's competitive economic environment, traceability is a key concept related to all products and all types of supply chains. The goal of this paper is to describe development of application that enables to create and share information about the physical movement and status of products as they travel throughout the supply chain. The main purpose of this paper is to describe the development of RFID based track and trace system for ensuring the visibility and traceability of items in logistics chain especially in automotive industry. The proposed solution is based on EPCglobal Network Architecture

On Data Representation and Use In A Temporal Relational DBMS

Numerous proposals for extending the relational data model to incorporate the temporal dimension of data have appeared over the past decade. It has long been known that these proposals have adopted one of two basic approaches to the incorporation of time into the extended relational model. Recent work formally contrasted the expressive power of these two approaches, termed temporally ungrouped and temporally grouped, and demonstrated that the temporally grouped models are more expressive. IN the temporally ungrouped models, the temporal dimension is added through the addition of some number of distinguished attributes to the schema of each relation, and each tuple is "stamped" with temporal values for these attributes. By contrast, in temporally grouped models the temporal dimension is added to the types of values that serve as the domain of each ordinary attribute, and the application's schema is left intact. The recent appearance of TSQL2, a temporal extension to the SQL-92 standard based upon the temporally ungrouped paradigm, means that it is likely that commercial DBMS's will be extended to support time in this weaker way. Thus the distinction between these two approaches - and its impact on the day-to-day user of a DBMS - is of increasing relevance to the database practitioner and the database user community. In this paper we address this issue from the practical perspective of such a user. Through a series of example queries and updates, we illustrate the differences between these two approaches and demonstrate that the temporally grouped approach more adequately captures the semantics of historical data.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

The archaeological database—New relations?

Over two decades have passed since the foundations of the relational data model were formalised (Codd 1970) and today a large number of Database Management Systems (DBMS) based on its principles are readily available. The better of these have attained a high degree of sophistication, running in a variety of environments — micros, workstations, minis and mainframes — and have achieved some standardisation through the adoption of Standard (or Structured) Query Language (SQL). As such, the user who invests much time in learning to use a DBMS and its development tools, for example INGRES, will have little problem when the present micro is dumped and a workstation appears on the desk. More importantly for archaeological information, the data, its structure, and application programs will also transfer with minimal upheaval. This is a salutary warning to those investing a great deal of resources in non-upwardly mobile micro-based DBMS and they are urged to consider employing either ORACLE or INGRES (the current flagships of the 4th generation language multi- environment relational DBMS) if they wish to ensure the longevity of their work. The reference to work rather than just to data is deliberate and the cornerstone of this paper, for information is not just data values; it is the context and meaning of those values that ultimately determine the usefulness of the data. Data structure, user interfaces, validation procedures, help systems and applications are inextricably linked with the raw data, giving it context and providing a crude but non-trivial 'knowledge base' without which data files may be useless, or even a negative resource, if misunderstood. Although high-quality relational DBMS did not come into general use as commercial products until the late 1980s, deficiencies in the relational model had already been noted in the previous decade. Important new products are likely to become generally available soon. Many of the major research areas of general DBMS have direct application in the management of archaeological data. The aim of this paper is to discuss some of the limitations and deficiencies of currently available relational DBMS, to review informally the most relevant areas of development (and one area which has yet to be developed), and to consider the implications for mainstream archaeology