Auto-ID enabled tracking and tracing data sharing over dynamic B2B and B2G relationships

RFID 2011 collocated with the 2011 IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Workshop Series on Millimeter Wave Integration Technologies (IMWS 2011)Growing complexity and uncertainty are still the key challenges enterprises are facing in managing and re-engineering their existing supply chains. To tackle these challenges, they are continuing innovating management practices and piloting emerging technologies for achieving supply chain visibility, agility, adaptability and security. Nowadays, subcontracting has already become a common practice in modern logistics industry through partnership establishment between the involved stakeholders for delivering consignments from a consignor to a consignee. Companies involved in international supply chain are piloting various supply chain security and integrity initiatives promoted by customs to establish trusted business-to-customs partnership for facilitating global trade and cutting out avoidable supply chain costs and delays due to governmental regulations compliance and unnecessary customs inspection. While existing Auto-ID enabled tracking and tracing solutions are promising for implementing these practices, they provide few efficient privacy protection mechanisms for stakeholders involved in the international supply chain to communicate logistics data over dynamic business-to-business and business-government relationships. A unified privacy protection mechanism is proposed in this work to fill in this gap. © 2011 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

When Things Matter: A Data-Centric View of the Internet of Things

With the recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID), low-cost wireless sensor devices, and Web technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) approach has gained momentum in connecting everyday objects to the Internet and facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communication with the physical world. While IoT offers the capability to connect and integrate both digital and physical entities, enabling a whole new class of applications and services, several significant challenges need to be addressed before these applications and services can be fully realized. A fundamental challenge centers around managing IoT data, typically produced in dynamic and volatile environments, which is not only extremely large in scale and volume, but also noisy, and continuous. This article surveys the main techniques and state-of-the-art research efforts in IoT from data-centric perspectives, including data stream processing, data storage models, complex event processing, and searching in IoT. Open research issues for IoT data management are also discussed

Valuation of online social networks - An economic model and its application using the case of Xing.com

Ubiquitous information technologies like RFID allow for immediate, extensive and fine-grained capture of real world information. Scalable and efficient networks for exchange of this vast amount of information amongst companies are crucial for the economic exploitation of benefits of ubiquitous information technologies. Existing networks bear several limitations like risks of single-point-offailures or bottlenecks, unequally distributed power and burdens as well as inflexibility through stringent structures and formats. In particular there is a need for improving the scalability of solutions and ensuring autonomy of network participants. In this paper we introduce a Peer-to-Peer-based architecture for exchanging distributed information, which are shared among participants of a supply chain facilitated with ubiquitous information technologies. This architecture builds on the wellestablished EPCglobal standards, but can be implemented as an autonomous network. Unlike other architectures it does not need central coordination mechanisms, because it is based on self-organizing Peer-to-Peer protocols. We argue that our architecture supports business processes especially of small and medium-sized enterprises better than other architectures. We provide a discussion about requirements for solutions and a simulation-based analysis of the proposed architecture

An agent-based dynamic information network for supply chain management

One of the main research issues in supply chain management is to improve the global efficiency of supply chains. However, the improvement efforts often fail because supply chains are complex, are subject to frequent changes, and collaboration and information sharing in the supply chains are often infeasible. This paper presents a practical collaboration framework for supply chain management wherein multi-agent systems form dynamic information networks and coordinate their production and order planning according to synchronized estimation of market demands. In the framework, agents employ an iterative relaxation contract net protocol to find the most desirable suppliers by using data envelopment analysis. Furthermore, the chain of buyers and suppliers, from the end markets to raw material suppliers, form dynamic information networks for synchronized planning. This paper presents an agent-based dynamic information network for supply chain management and discusses the associated pros and cons

Benefits through Utilising EPC Network Components in Service‐Oriented Environments – an Analysis Using the Example of the Food Industry

Improvements in the food sector imply enhancements of delivering food which is safe, affordable, readily available, and of the quality and diversity consumers expect. However, prevalent information systems (IS) of companies in the food industry are not ready to support further significant improvements. They especially lack the capability to exchange relevant information in an efficient manner. Since recently, two major developments can be observed from IS perspective: the spreading of service-oriented architectures (SOA) as well as an increase in mass serialization (due to public and private traceability requirements, e.g.). So far, though most important due to food safety, a growing need to become more efficient as well as an increasing information demand of consumers, the food sector has attracted little attention in literature concerning an analysis about the potential of both service-orientation and the Electronic Product Code (EPC) Network. This is why this paper will investigate to which extent these two developments can contribute to facilitate food companies’ IS helping them to maintain their competiveness. As a starting point, the research paper will depict the state of the art including SOA and the EPC Network. After describing the research approach, it will proceed with a characterisation of the food sector including an examination why there is need for action. Based on current research findings as well as experience gathered in recent projects, the paper will investigate the application of the EPC Network with its three major components, i. e. EPCIS (EPC Information Services), ONS (Object Name Service) and the EPC Discovery Services, as part of future IS architectures in this sector. The paper will close with a discussion whether the envisioned IS architecture is appropriate to accomplish the previously identified challenges and requirements in the food sector in a more agile, efficient and effective way. What is more, it will highlight the most pressing challenges and provide an outlook as to the following steps of the research

Federated Sensor Network architectural design for the Internet of Things (IoT)

An information technology that can combine the physical world and virtual world is desired. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept system that uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), WSN and barcode scanners to sense and to detect physical objects and events. This information is shared with people on the Internet. With the announcement of the Smarter Planet concept by IBM, the problem of how to share this data was raised. However, the original design of WSN aims to provide environment monitoring and control within a small scale local network. It cannot meet the demands of the IoT because there is a lack of multi-connection functionality with other WSNs and upper level applications. As various standards of WSNs provide information for different purposes, a hybrid system that gives a complete answer by combining all of them could be promising for future IoT applications. This thesis is on the subject of `Federated Sensor Network' design and architectural development for the Internet of Things. A Federated Sensor Network (FSN) is a system that integrates WSNs and the Internet. Currently, methods of integrating WSNs and the Internet can follow one of three main directions: a Front-End Proxy solution, a Gateway solution or a TCP/IP Overlay solution. Architectures based on the ideas from all three directions are presented in this thesis; this forms a comprehensive body of research on possible Federated Sensor Network architecture designs. In addition, a fully compatible technology for the sensor network application, namely the Sensor Model Language (SensorML), has been reviewed and embedded into our FSN systems. The IoT as a new concept is also comprehensively described and the major technical issues discussed. Finally, a case study of the IoT in logistic management for emergency response is given. Proposed FSN architectures based on the Gateway solution are demonstrated through hardware implementation and lab tests. A demonstration of the 6LoWPAN enabled federated sensor network based on the TCP/IP Overlay solution presents a good result for the iNET localization and tracking project. All the tests of the designs have verified feasibility and achieve the target of the IoT concept

Business process and technology lessons learned, recommendations and best practices for new adopters

Thesis (M. Eng. in Logistics)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2006."June 2006."Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-118).This thesis focuses on documenting learnings from a RFID data exchange pilot in the fast moving consumer goods industry. The pilot we studied is a collaborative effort between two of the largest retailers in the world and five of their major suppliers, facilitated by EPCglobal and the MIT Auto-ID labs. Currently, manufacturers and suppliers are building the infrastructure to exchange EPC data to validate standards and proof of concepts for RFID adoption. The outcome of these pilots will essentially set the stage for large scale RFID adoption worldwide. Our thesis attempts to document issues relating to data exchange from business process, organizational and technical perspectives. We have synthesized the findings and consolidated the lessons learned during the pilot in an attempt to form a set of actionable recommendations for new companies looking to start on RFID pilot projects.by Rida Chan [and] Sangeeth Ram.M.Eng.in Logistic