Performance enhancement of the EPCglobal network by aggregating data at the EPCIS

Abstract

RFID is a well known acronym for Radio-Frequency Identification, which is a technology similar to the existing bar code identification. This particular technology is capable of uniquely identifying tagged objects, which can be either living or inanimate. Items such as documents, people, animal, vehicles, containers and practically everything on this planet are capable of being tagged. With the enhancement of condensing the size and the cost, RFID has become a promising technology and has created infinite opportunities for new and improved services for consumers. In particular, RIFD technology will have an extensive variety of positive impacts in the supply chain. The main mechanism by which this will take place is the EPCglobal network, originally proposed by EPCglobal, Inc. The primary purpose of the EPCglobal network is to share product data in the supply chain. The current architecture of the EPCglobal network presents exceptional opportunities for all- from manufacturers to retailers, to overcome challenges in the supply chain. It is designed to function as a robust, extensible, scalable, and platform independent system. Even though it does achieve the majority of its objectives, it has some limitation when it comes to address the issue of data aggregation methods. In this thesis, the author analyses the current architecture of the EPCglobal network and provides a detailed explanation of the proposed solution in order to address the issues in the existing EPCglobal network. As the Author states, the current network does achieve the most of its duty, but there are some limitations related to data aggregation at the EPCIS of the retailer. Since every query goes out to the internet in order to retrieve its master information from the manufacturer’s database, this introduces a significant delay as well as consumes existing bandwidth of the EPCglobal network. The proposed technique introduces a method for aggregating data based on the information in each query and will be aggregated in order to enhance the performance of the existing EPC network. In this thesis, it has been proved that the proposed data aggregation method have enhanced the performance of the EPCglobal network.