Vision and Challenges for Realising the Internet of Things

Nevertheless, the majority of existing literature in RFID systems is primarily at a prototype or
simulation stage. In effect, very few publications discuss the actual deployment effects of RFID
technology in the field. Notable exceptions are the works of Ngai et al. (2007) and Delen et al.
(2007). In a commercial setting, the most renowned example is the Metro Future Store, located
in Germany, which comprises an aggregated test-case laboratory showcasing the potential
of Auto-ID technologies in the retail setting.
In this context, the SMART project (IST-20005, FP6) proposes RFID-enabled supply chain
services in the retail industry, building on the capabilities provided by RFID technology, data
stream management systems and web service orchestration. The retail services that have been
selected, namely dynamic-pricing and promotions management have been deployed in three
commercial sites at different European countries with participating user companies being
European grocery retailers and suppliers from the fast-moving consumer goods sector. As a
result, valuable lessons have been learnt for the deployment of RFID applications spanning
the whole spectrum, from RFID readability issues, integration with the legacy systems, cost,
web-service synchronization, consumer privacy to name but a few areas where experience was
gained. The acquired knowledge is shared through this paper to provide guidance to future
developers of RFID-enabled supply chain services as well as to set an agenda for academic
research.
The TraSer project (IST-033512, FP6) already bears its focus in its acronym, being assembled
from the words tracking and services. As opposed to concentrating on the sole use of RFID
itself, the project pursued the provision of a general service background for tracking and tracing
of uniquely identified entities. The targeted user range were small-scale users such as
SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), therefore, affordability, lean infrastructural demands,
cross-company transparency and easy adaptation to legacy IT components and external
protocols/requirements were the key preferences to meet. Central output of the project
was a free, open-source track-and-trace solution framework relying on web services for communication
and XML/XQuery for handling the data of the items tracked. Largely independent
of the physical ID carrier (and thus also transparently allowing other means of unique identification
than RFID), the platform has been tested in a wide range of applications, from tracking
of physical items to distributed version control of electronic design documents, both in closedcircuit
asset management and supply chains. The TraSer solution platform is listed on Sourceforge,
and can be also downloaded from the project website http://www.traser-project.eu.
2 Lessons Learnt from the SMART project
2.1 RFID-enabled Services over the SMART Architecture Framework
In the course of the SMART project (IST-20005, FP6) with participating user companies being
European grocery retailers and suppliers from the fast-moving consumer goods sector, a layered,
distributed, service-oriented architecture framework is proposed to support RFIDenabled
supply chain services in the retail industry. The SMART architecture utilizes the
automatic, unique identification capabilities of RFID technology; data stream management
systems (Chatziantoniou et al. 2005) and web service orchestration (Muehlen et al. 2005) to
enable information sharing and collaboration among retail supply chain partners.
Figure 4.4-1 illustrates a high-level logical view of the SMART architecture framework (Bardaki
& Kourouthanassis 2009). It is a distributed architecture framework, where the application
layer runs on the system of each collaborating partner and web services implement the
interface between the different partners’ systems using SOAP requests and responses. The
data layer is implemented by both a relational database management system (Object Instance
Information Service) and a data stream management system (DSMS) providing the application
layer with continuous real time reports after processing unique product identification
data streams generated from the RFID infrastructure. The orchestration engine coordinates
the exchange of messages between the partners’ web services following the logic of the specific
supply chain application services. The service repository provides an interface for the orchestration
engine to execute queries and discover the exposed services from the partners. The
object instance directory stores partners’ identifiers that can provide information for unique
object instances. It accepts queries about unique object instances (electronic product codes-
EPCs) and replies with the partner’s identifier that can provide the required object instance
information. The partners' registration directory stores all partners’ registration information
and relationships among partners.
The proposed framework builds on the EPCglobal architecture framework. However, SMART
suggests a service-oriented approach, utilizing web services, to enable EPC-related information
exchange between retail partners opposed to the object-oriented approach of EPCglobal.
CERP-IoT – Cluster of European Research Projects on the Internet of Things
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