Vision and Challenges for Realising the Internet of Things

4.4 RFID-enabled Tracking and
Tracing in the Supply Chain
Lessons Learnt from the
SMART and TRASER projects
Cleopatra Bardaki, Katerina Pramatari / Elisabeth Ilie-Zudor, Zsolt Kemény
ELTRUN Research Lab, Department of Management Science and Technology Athens
University of Economics and Business / Computer and Automation Research
Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Abstract: The paper summarizes the results of two 6FP-funded projects aiming to establish
tracking and tracing services relying on RFID. In the lifespan of the SMART project (IST-2005,
FP6), two RFID-enabled services, supporting dynamic-pricing of fresh products and management
of promotion events, have been deployed on a service-oriented architecture that utilizes RFID
technology, data stream management systems and web services. The two services have been fieldtested
in three retail stores in Greece, Ireland, and Cyprus. The valuable lessons learnt, concerning
RFID readability challenges, consumer privacy, customers and store staff health concerns, investment
cost, and so on, are reported to provide guidance to future developers of RFIDintegrated
supply chain services as well as to set an agenda for academic research. The TraSer
project pursued the introduction of track-and-trace services especially in the lower end of the application
spectrum, i.e., small-scale users as SMEs and other smaller organizations. TraSer provided
a free, open-source solution platform using web services for communication and a variety of
possible physical ID carriers (not limited to RFID) for unique identification. An architectural
overview gives insight into design preferences and choices determining the framework architecture,
while a report on relevant cases selected from a wider range of application pilots outlines the
experience gathered with deployment on different scales.
1 Introduction
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is a key technology today that drives developments in
the area of the Internet of Things. RFID is a wireless communication technology that uses
radio-frequency waves to transfer identifying information between tagged objects and readers
without requiring line of sight, providing a means of automatic identification (Sheng et al.
2008).
Although some of the underlying technologies for RFID have been around for more than half a
century and both technically feasible and practically usable solutions have appeared already
more than a decade ago, only recently have supply chain partners started to explore its potential
to support core business processes. This shift of attention should be primarily attributed to
the decrease of acquisition costs for the technology parts (readers, tags, printers), the availability
of related services and functionalities, as well as the emergence of proof-of-concept
application prototypes by large retailers and suppliers. Currently, RFID is emerging as an
important technology for revolutionizing a wide range of applications, including supply-chain
management, retail sales, anti-counterfeiting, and healthcare (Nath et al. 2006).
The advent of RFID, as an enabling Auto-ID technology, generated significant interest to the
retail sector mainly because of its capability to streamline core supply chain management operations.
As a result, over the past few years several research projects emerged discussing different
flavours of RFID-augmented applications in such supply chain management areas as
inventory management (Fleisch et al. 2005) and customer relationship management in the
form of ‘smart’ personal shopping assistants capable of guiding and assisting consumers
throughout their shopping trip within the physical store (Kourouthanassis et al. 2003).
CERP-IoT – Cluster of European Research Projects on the Internet of Things
111