Applied Research
R&D Projects
|FP6 - Traser
Download THE RFID TECHNOLOGY AND ITS CURRENT APPLICATIONS
Program: FP6
Project full title: Identity Based Tracking and Web Services for SMEs
Proposal no: 033512
Instrument: STREP
Partners: SZTAKI, HUT, RUG, INNOTEC, POST, TNO
Technologies: RFID
Ropardo (WPCS) Partner's Web-site:
Concept:
The TraSeR project will develop, test, and document innovative ICT-enabled web-services and logistics solutions for changing environments, such as supply-chains, service operations and project delivery networks. This will be done by linking the electronic identity of products and product representations to identity specific tracking and related web services. The research and development effort will result in a TraSeR open source community. It will provide information on standards and recommended design patterns, that when followed, make individually developed SME applications interchangeable and possible to use temporarily or in parallel without efficiency loss in the operations of logistics service providers and other companies handling products and product data.
Ropardo (WPCS) Role:
Ropardo (WPCS) tasks mainly address two work packages:
- SME scenarios for tracking-based services and business: describes specific SME business scenarios and models the potential benefits of developing product-centric applications in the scenario situations. The scenario situations are to be developed around product-centric tracking of physical products, and product-centric tracking of electronic product models.
- Accessible environment for tracking-data capture: TraSer applications evaluation and exploitation.
- Moreover, Ropardo (WPCS) expressed its wish to be involved in tasks related to TraSer integration with ERP systems.
Recent years brought an increasing need of:
- Tracking products throughout an entire network of cooperating enterprises
- Tracing components during the assembly of composite products.
- However, tracking and tracing solutions can only benefit cooperating companies if their operation is:
- Without notable delay,
- Free of human error,
- Reliable with respect to data integrity,
- Secure for handling confidential production information,
- Compatible to the standards of other partners.
Although several tracking and tracing solutions exist, they proved to be too expensive and difficult to implement for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
The TraSer project will develop, test, and document innovative ICT-enabled web-services and logistics solutions for changing environments, such as supply-chains, service operations and project delivery networks. This will be done by linking the electronic identity of products and product representations to identity specific tracking and related web services. The research and development effort will result in a TraSer open source community. It will provide information on standards and recommended design patterns, that when followed, make individually developed SME applications interchangeable and possible to use temporarily or in parallel without efficiency loss in the operations of logistics service providers and other companies handling products and product data.
The project work will be conducted in close co-operation with communities of potential SME users while aiming at proposing, testing and refining SME friendly business scenarios for services such as: material flow transparency, quality control, and product data management in changing and temporary networks. The issue of deploying SME specific applications in a changing network of participants will be addressed through piloting. In the two pilots, solutions for linking RFID-readers and product data repositories to SME specific monitoring and control applications will be developed and tested.
The scientific objective is to develop through interative action innovation an understanding of how network partners could be motivated to participate in supporting network level information services deployed by SMEs, and what are the commercial best practices and technological solutions that facilitate such network level services. The technological objective is to understand how to integrate innovative TraSer-type product-centric solutions with existing transaction processing solutions, and how an open source application development platform can be effectively used by individual SMEs to develop network level services.
- Develop and test the tracking and tracing platform in close collaboration with industrial enterprises, so that real-life demands will determine the composition of the software package.
- Gather the experience of developments and tests and make it available to future users in form of reports and case studies, serving as a practical guide for the introduction of the TraSer platform.
- Organize workshops for potential users in order for participants to find comprehensive answers to their questions and share experience.
- Establish an open-source community where add-ons can be shared and tested and further improvement of the TraSer software can be discussed with the developers.
- Advance the theory of product-centric service innovation, the evolution paths for product-centric information architectures and applications.
Within the framework of the EU-funded TraSer, project, it is being elaborated a tracking and tracing solution which SMEs will find easier to apply for a variety of reasons:
- Low initial investment, as SMEs will be able to set up a basic product-centric tracking service with components available for free from the open source community.
- No additional registration costs for item identification will be charged, as opposed to present-day proprietary ID providers.
- Compatibility with legacy and low-end standard systems, as tools will be provided for embedding the new tracking and tracing services into an already existing enterprise resource planning.
- Lean implementation and maintenance, as the application of the solution platform is meant to be simple, not requiring much IT specialist staff.
- SME access to current logistics data and RFID, barcode etc. readers of service providers, as TraSer will provide guidelines and standards which, when followed, will ensure interchangeability with information of other SMEs and logistics service providers.
The TraSer software platform will further develop and structure the DIALOG concept and software platform started in 2001. An identification solution of the ID@URI format was adopted for creating the link between the tangible product and its information. URI is a computer address e.g. 'www.some_company.com') and ID is a serial number or some other unique number at the URI indicated that identifies the product item (or shipment). ID@URI can be printed as text, barcode or programmed into a (programmable) RFID chip.
In 2003 an Open Source Community was launched (http://dialog.hut.fi) for further development of the DIALOG Java-based software components, which cover driver architecture for RFID and barcode readers, communication over Internet and information fetch/update from/to company databases.
Communication is based on the peer-to-peer (P2P) principle, where any node in the network can both send and receive messages over organizational boundaries and independently of the size of the computing device. A major advantage of this approach is that it makes it possible to keep information where it has been created and giving (or not) controlled access to it, instead of collecting information to centralized hubs or portals.
RFID is only one of the numerous technologies grouped under the term Automatic Identification (Auto ID), such as bar code, magnetic inks, optical character recognition, voice recognition, touch memory, smart cards, biometrics etc. Auto ID technologies are a new way of controlling information and material flow, especially suitable for large production networks.
The RFID technology is a means of gathering data about a certain item without the need of touching or seeing the data carrier through the use of inductive coupling or electromagnetic waves. The data carrier is a microchip attached to an antenna (together called transponder or tag), the latter enabling the chip to transmit information to a reader (or transceiver) within a given range, which can forward the information to a host computer. The middleware (software for reading and writing tags) and the tag can be enhanced by data encryption for security-critical application at an extra cost, and anti-collision algorithms may be implemented for the tags if several of them are to be read simultaneously.
One important feature enabling RFID to track objects is its capability to provide unique identification. One possible approach to item identification is the EPC (Electronic Product Code) [4], pro-viding a standardized number in the EPCglobal Network, with an Object Name Service (ONS) providing the adequate Internet addresses to access or update instant specific data. However, currently, ONS cannot be used in a global environment, and since it is a proprietary service, its use is relatively expensive, especially for participants with limited resources such as SMEs. As an alternative, researchers from the Helsinki University [7] have proposed the notation ID@URI, where ID stands for an identity code, and URI stands for a corresponding Internet address. This allows several partners to use the system and still guarantee unique identification. The project Identity-Based Tracking and Web-Services for SMEs (http://www.traser-project.eu) is currently working on further development of this concept.
ROPARDO, Romania