A multi-agent based system RFID middleware for data and device management

Published ArticleRadio-frequency Identification (RFID) technology promises to revolutionize business processes. While RFID technology is improving rapidly, a reliable deployment of this technology is still a significant challenge impeding its widespread adoption. In this paper we provide a brief overview of some common fundamental characteristics of RFID data and devices, which pose significant challenges in the design of RFID middleware systems. In addition, the development of a multi-agent RFID middleware solution to address the RFID data and device management challenges is discussed

Application independent in location tracking framework

Due to significant popularity of location-based services and multimedia communication over mobile devices, many researches have been conducted to extend the features of location tracking and make it cost effective to users. This research focuses on the performance of an indoor location tracking system on IPv6 network island with multiple real time applications that has location assisted session transfer feature for mobile users. Received signal strength Indicator mechanism has been used to locate the moving nodes. This research involved the development of location tracking server that monitors the dynamic and centralised MySQL database management system. Session initial protocols user agent has been used to deploy intercommunicating of multimedia data such as video and audio conference, text messaging among the moving nodes and users are able to transfer the multimedia sessions seamlessly to their nearest mobile nodes which will be determined by the location server. This study, thus, presents the variation of location tracking accuracy of triangulation system and fingerprint system on different indoor surroundings to compare the performance of their location tracking accuracy. Two indoor positioning systems, triangulation method (TM) and fingerprint method (FPM) were implemented and experiments were successfully conducted in different large area and small area scenarios of indoor environment. FPM experiments were examined into two sections: FPM database with data redundancy and FPM database without data redundancy. FPM database without data redundancy achieved 94.287% tracking accuracy which is the highest comparing to the FPM database with data redundancy and TM

SafeRFID-MW: a RFID Middleware with runtime fault diagnosis

In recent years, due to the proliferation of radio fre-quency identification (RFID) technology in everyday life, espe-cially in critical domains such as health care and transportation systems, significant efforts have been made to enhance the de-pendability of this technology. From these efforts have emerged specific techniques and several middleware solutions to handle the large amount of the RFID data. These solutions are not suita-ble for all RFID system requirements especially for issues related to critical domains. In this paper, we propose a novel fault-tolerant RFID middleware providing two fault-tolerant mechan-isms. The first mechanism is an online diagnosis algorithm based on a statistical analysis of the generated RFID data to identify faulty components of the system such as faulty readers or tags. The second mechanism is a verification process based on an extended finite state machine of the Low Level Reader Protocol (LLRP), the communication standard between RFID readers and RFID middleware. This process aims at identifying the causes of the diagnosed failures

Architectural Solutions for Mobile RFID Services on Internet of Things

Mobile RFID services for the Internet of Things can be created by using RFID as an enabling technology in mobile devices. Humans, devices, and things are the content providers and users of these services. Mobile RFID services can be either provided on mobile devices as stand-alone services or combined with end-to-end systems. When different service solution scenarios are considered, there are more than one possible architectural solution in the network, mobile, and back-end server areas. Combining the solutions wisely by applying the software architecture and engineering principles, a combined solution can be formulated for certain application specific use cases. This thesis illustrates these ideas. It also shows how generally the solutions can be used in real world use case scenarios. A case study is used to add further evidence

The design and development of multi-agent based RFID middleware system for data and devices management

Thesis (D. Tech. (Electrical Engineering)) - Central University of technology, Free State, 2012Radio frequency identification technology (RFID) has emerged as a key technology for automatic identification and promises to revolutionize business processes. While RFID technology adoption is improving rapidly, reliable and widespread deployment of this technology still faces many significant challenges. The key deployment challenges include how to use the simple, unreliable raw data generated by RFID deployments to make business decisions; and how to manage a large number of deployed RFID devices. In this thesis, a multi-agent based RFID middleware which addresses some of the RFID data and device management challenges was developed. The middleware developed abstracts the auto-identification applications from physical RFID device specific details and provides necessary services such as device management, data cleaning, event generation, query capabilities and event persistence. The use of software agent technology offers a more scalable and distributed system architecture for the proposed middleware. As part of a multi-agent system, application-independent domain ontology for RFID devices was developed. This ontology can be used or extended in any application interested with RFID domain ontology. In order to address the event processing tasks within the proposed middleware system, a temporal-based RFID data model which considers both applications’ temporal and spatial granules in the data model itself for efficient event processing was developed. The developed data model extends the conventional Entity-Relationship constructs by adding a time attribute to the model. By maintaining the history of events and state changes, the data model captures the fundamental RFID application logic within the data model. Hence, this new data model supports efficient generation of application level events, updating, querying and analysis of both recent and historical events. As part of the RFID middleware, an adaptive sliding-window based data cleaning scheme for reducing missed readings from RFID data streams (called WSTD) was also developed. The WSTD scheme models the unreliability of the RFID readings by viewing RFID streams as a statistical sample of tags in the physical world, and exploits techniques grounded in sampling theory to drive its cleaning processes. The WSTD scheme is capable of efficiently coping with both environmental variations and tag dynamics by automatically and continuously adapting its cleaning window size, based on observed readings

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse