Supply chain knowledge management:a literature review

This paper aims to contribute to the debate on the role of knowledge management in supply chain management by reviewing the published literature. A total of 58 selected referred journal articles were systematically analyzed. This review identifies various theoretical and methodological characteristics of the way in which knowledge management applications are proposed in the supply chain context. The review shows that little evidence exists of the positive relation between the use of IT solutions and firms’ performance. Some issues remain unexplored such as the problem of knowledge obsolescence in supply chain management. A deeper understanding of the knowledge accumulation process could give new insights. The paper concludes with some future directions for theory construction and empirical research

PUF-based authentication protocol to address ticket-switching of RFID-tagged items

Ticket-switching incidents where customers switch the price tag or bar code in order to pay a lower amount for their ‘purchased item’ is not uncommon in retail stores. Since the item has to pass through a check-out counter before leaving the store, it has a (even if miniscule) positive probability of being identified. However, when item-level RFID tags are used in an automated check-out environment, the probability of such incidents coming to light is estimated to be almost zero. We propose an authentication protocol for this scenario using a pair of item-level RFID tags, one of which is PUF-enabled to resist cloning attacks

Extending a tabular knowledge-based framework with feature selection

Tabular knowledge-based systems are known for their ease in verification and validation of knowledge bases. The main drawback of these systems is the combinatorial explosion that occurs as the number of conditions used in the table is increased. In this paper, we alleviate this problem by incorporating a new feature selection method, based on the 'blurring' measure, in the tabular knowledge-based framework. The framework consists of three stages. In the first stage, raw data are preprocessed to reduce the data set sufficiently using feature selection. Rules are then generated and incorporated in the system. In the second stage, based on the extracted rules, the knowledge is modelled by means of decision tables. Verification and validation checks are also performed during this stage. In the final stage of the framework, the modelled knowledge is incorporated in an expert system environment, to facilitate consultation of the knowledge base. The different stages of the framework are illustrated using direct mail-order company data. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd

A secure search protocol for low cost passive RFID tags

We propose a secure RFID tag search protocol that ensures the security and privacy of the tags being searched. To our knowledge, not much work has been done in this area of RFID systems. Further, most of the current methods do not comply with the EPC standard as they use expensive hash operations or encryption schemes that cannot be implemented on resource-constrained, low-cost passive tags. Our work aims to fill this gap by proposing a protocol based on quadratic residues which requires the tags to perform only simple XOR, MOD and 128 bit PRNG operations, thus achieving compliance with EPC standards. Our protocol also addresses the vulnerabilities in the protocol proposed by Sundaresan et al. (2012) [1] which is not forward secure, and the weak message construction leading to incorrect tag authentication. We present a detailed security analysis to show that the proposed method achieves the required security properties and the simulation results show that the proposed method is scalable