A Healthy Dose of RFID
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Imagine a world where every single manufactured item is tagged with a tiny RFID chip that holds various bits of information about that item. And as each item moves along a supply chain&151;information is gathered, stored and accessed at various points in a mixture of systems.
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The goal is to be able to know where everything&151;is at any given time. The challenge, however, is determining how such a scenario would play out: what the actual network would look like once companies up and down the supply chain collaboratively start inputting and exchanging information among trading partners and their partners&39;s goods. It has created standards to enable RFID data exchange and has proposed a network architecture, called the EPC Network, for enabling all the objects in the world to be linked via the Internet. At the same time, other groups&151;have floated potential, and competing, network architectures that could accommodate the global exchange of RFID data.
But before a network architecture can be agreed upon, some basic questions need to be answered: How much network traffic would be created in such a scenario where every physical item transmits data? What type of architecture is necessary to support a scalable network? What type of security would be necessary to validate queries? And what kinds of resources will be needed to handle all this traffic?
These are just some of the questions being tackled by MIT&151;the successor to the Auto-ID Center, which was split in 2003 into Auto-ID Labs and EPCglobal&39;s RFID product tracking and authentication application.
On MIT&39;s side, heading the EPC data project is John Williams, a specialist in simulation and large-scale data modeling who has been asked by the Department of Homeland Security to simulate different networks, such as the Internet, telephone networks and water-supply systems, where communication has broken down at one time or another.” />
Homeland Security to simulate different networks, such as the Internet, telephone networks and water-supply systems, where communication has broken down at one time or another.
Williams has some clear ideas about how RFID data can be used to facilitate communication among companies and about the challenges that lie ahead.
“The idea would be to know where everything is at any time. One of the things&151;is that in a year, maybe a trillion products are manufactured, so to try and keep track of trillions of things, we haven&91;network&91;RFID-enabled network&91;an item&39;s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers in a triumvirate of top-tier suppliers, has standardized on RFID in its California distribution center&39;s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers in a triumvirate of top-tier suppliers, has standardized on RFID in its California distribution center&151;manufacturer, retailer, wholesaler. Everyone has to worry about the problem, as opposed to other &93; which would be attributable to one aspect of the supply chain,” said Krish Mantripragada, director of RFID, SCM (supply chain management) and solution management at SAP Labs, in Palo Alto, Calif. “The project is looking at a much bigger problem, but ePedigree keeps the project grounded.”
In addition to offering best practices for RFID implementations and the pharmaceutical industry, SAP Labs is contributing an ERP (enterprise resource planning) system to Auto-ID Labs. Running at MIT, in Cambridge, the software incorporates SAP data and business processes. Actual customer input will come in the project&91;tagged items&91;and&39;s potential risks to data security and privacy. Click here to read more.
For the simulation, the teams have taken a two-pronged approach, asking both concrete questions that speak to SAP&151;RFID and supply chain applications&151;how best to connect companies and identify people in an RFID-supported supply chain&39;t any EPC-based networks in operation.
The Auto-ID Labs simulator can replicate as many as 100,000 facilities, with 10 million items traveling through the combined facilities on a given day.
“Each facility is a state machine that runs through its own multithread,” said Williams, who is simulating the flow of goods and purchase orders up and down the supply chain. “Our goal is to simulate the pharmaceutical supply chain. Having formed that, we believe we can get enough information to simulate other verticals, &93; auto and aerospace.”
To do the simulation, Williams has built a model of a generic facility&151;and then multiplied the generic model to simulate 100,000 facilities. Each facility has two inputs: purchase orders and physical goods. Purchase orders flow from retailer to manufacturer, and physical goods flow from manufacturer to retailer, with distributors and wholesalers getting in the mix at different points of the process. The simulation environment changes the amount of purchase orders and physical goods flowing between facilities at any given time to determine network capabilities. “I can take all the POs for Viagra from all the CVS stores &93; so that a wholesaler will say, &39; and then send that PO up to a distributor,” he said. “So what we have is a state machine. The systems have certain states they can be in that are well-defined and change depending on input&39;s what we&39;s product strategy but also the RFID industry itself.
“We have firsthand insight into this new technology, and we will understand better how to develop innovative products for our customers,” Hofmann said. “We will understand better what the market needs, the real problems, and what type of technology we have to develop and buy to realize this solution.” At the same time, SAP and MIT presenting a joint “profound concept” for collaboration and data exchange over the Internet will carry weight with the RFID industry in general, Hofmann said.
Next Page: Competing architectures.
Via ePedigree, the EPCglobal data project is simulating several architectural models&151;for both single and distributed networks. But outside the pharmaceutical industry, several competing network architectures are in play. The most widely described architecture is the EPC Network, which was developed to ensure global interoperability of tag data as products move along the supply chain.
The EPC Network consists of three major components: EPC Discovery Services, essentially an electronic chain of custody for EPC tags; EPC Information Services, the interpreter communicating between a database and applications; and an Object Name Service, which identifies the location of the server hosting the appropriate information needed by an application.
The EPC Network, proposed by EPCglobal, is essentially a central repository. There is also a hybrid model that assumes all data is local to various enterprises, and intelligence discovery mechanisms are used to search for relevant data.
Then there are document models, on-demand models and registry models to consider.
“This &93; is the first scientific analysis where we look at a couple of different architectures&39;s Mantripragada.
Given that the yearlong project is in its early stages, researchers at Auto-ID Labs and SAP Labs are reluctant to release initial results regarding architectural models. But Tao Lin, senior research scientist and EPCglobal data project manager with SAP Labs, said there are some widely understood findings about the proposed architectures.
“&93; some of the architectures proposed by EPC or by other organizations, we found some assumptions in the beginning weren&151;say, at a manufacturer&39;s product strategy.
A larger implication of the study is that because the whole concept of RFID-tagged goods throughout the world is so new, people haven&39;re talking about thousands, even millions of data storage systems&151;holding RFID/EPC data,” said Lin. “The data could have a contribution to a query. So now we&39;s infrastructure can actually support the data storage, Lin said. There is, however, Google. What Google brings to the table for the EPC data project is the concept of storing data in memory rather than in a database to enable extremely fast queries. MIT&39;s, with resident in-memory that is scalable.
“The big challenge is streaming data. How do you process lots of real-time data? That&39;re looking at are security, scalability and extensibility of the network&91;designed using&151;very close to the way the Internet works now. At the top level, each country hosts a top-level server, and then these top-level servers interface with each other. That&39;s going to have to work. We can&91;the data&39;s going to take a lot more sophistication than that.”
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