RFID context data management: The missing link to EPCIS-based supply chain monitoring

The potential of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) for increasing supply chain efficiency has been stressed by practitioners and researchers alike. For the cross-company exchange of RFIDrelated data, the industry consortium EPCglobal has specified the EPC Information Services (EPCIS). According to EPCglobal, all RFID-related data recorded by an organization should be stored as EPCIS events in a dedicated database. The information that can be inferred from the EPCIS events stored in the EPCIS repositories will be sufficient to monitor the flow of goods. However, generating an EPCIS event does not only require the data that is provided by the RFID readers but also the corresponding context data (e.g. physical locations, related business process steps and related transactions). For this missing link, i.e. the association of read events and context data, we propose an architectural component called Event Capturing Application (ECA). In this paper we propose a data model for storing and exchanging EPCIS context data in an efficient and standardizable way. We also present an algorithm that can be used to assemble EPCIS events from read events and context data. The functionality of our prototypical ECA was evaluated using noFilis' RFID middleware CrossTalk and the Fosstrack EPCIS implementation.