Vision and Challenges for Realising the Internet of Things

3 Enhancing European operations with RFID and fine-grained
information sharing
Over the past three years the BRIDGE project became a significant hub of European activity
on RFID research. Both the application and the technical work packages brought valuable
lessons to European practitioners and researchers, helping to define the future directions of
RFID in Europe. The technical work packages delivered next generation technology such as
track and trace algorithms, discovery services, security algorithms and low cost high read
range hardware. The application work packages trialled RFID in production, supply chain,
retail and asset management. Where possible, they made use of developments in the technical
work packages. Some of the key learnings from BRIDGE are summarized below:
The modular design of the track and trace analytics framework enabled easy extension to
other developments in BRIDGE, for example anti-counterfeit detection leveraged the event
gathering layer, then added a complex rule system to detect cloned tags, while an high-level
application programming interface was designed to support business-level queries and
alerting criteria from the various business work packages. The pharmaceutical pilot produced
a particularly comprehensive data set, including some interesting features especially
in the early stages of a pilot while the staff were still familiarizing themselves with the
equipment. These features in the data were useful for developing some of the criteria for
alerting about possible anomalies or deviations in the supply chain. Another important lesson
was that of data smoothing as it was noted that spurious data could alter the accuracy
even if some smoothing was done. It is therefore advisable to try to first improve the physical
installation to improve reliability and eliminate spurious reads, rather than relying only
on the algorithms to smooth the data.
BRIDGE has contributed significantly to the development of open global standards for Discovery
services, which will finally enable sharing of serial-level information within open
supply chain networks. However, there is opportunity for further development to determine
a viable business model for operators of Discovery Services and also to integrate support
for trading of serial-level information between partners, without incurring significant
transaction costs. Future developments could also see Discovery Services providing support
for integration of sensor information and agents; discovery of relevant sensor resources
allows gathering of information about the state or condition of each individual
product instance, while software agents could assist with automation of information discovery.
Other key areas that might gain momentum in the near future include ad-hoc wireless
networks, semantic tagging of entities, the mapping of digital, virtual and real entities,
processing, filtering and aggregation of data and processing of data streams in order to improve
quality of service.
A key learning from the anti-counterfeiting work was the importance of supply chain data
sharing, since an accurate system is very much based on traceability and its automated data
analysis. Although it was difficult to produce a business case for deploying an RFID infrastructure
solely for the combating counterfeiting, anti-counterfeit solutions represent only a
small marginal cost when a company is already committed to deploying RFID for other reasons,
such as efficiency improvements within the enterprise or supply chain. Key areas of
future research in security could be in energy-efficient encryption and data protection technologies,
models for decentralized authentication and trust, and privacy-preserving technology
for heterogeneous sets of devices. Reducing the cost of security is key to realization
of RFID based systems in the supply chain.
The pharmaceutical pilot showed that a combination of identification technologies such as
2-D matrix codes, barcodes and RFID can co-exist in a supply chain and all be used to
achieve unique identification of packages. An important outcome of this pilot was to highlight
the various benefits of networked based traceability, as opposed to document-centric
traceability. Prior to BRIDGE, work was already in progress to develop a standard for an
electronic pedigree document that could be appended and digitally signed at each step as it
is passed downstream along the supply chain with the goods. Although the EPCglobal Drug
Pedigree messaging standard satisfies the requirements of the US states introducing pedigree
legislation, the approach results in a very asymmetric visibility, with no improved visibility
benefit for manufacturers, despite their cost of tagging. It also lacks many of the
benefits of a more networked approach to pharmaceutical traceability, such as those demonstrated
in the BRIDGE pilot. These include opportunities for improved inventory management,
improved downstream visibility for manufacturers and the ability to do rapid and
selective product recalls.
CERP-IoT – Cluster of European Research Projects on the Internet of Things
151