Research On The RFID Middleware For Supply Chain Application

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technique is a non-contact automatic identification technology. RFID has the advantage of long recognition distance, small size, large information capacity, high environmental adaptability, etc. RFID has developed very rapidly in recent years, and has used in food safety, logistics, and supply chain systems. In the RFID system, RFID middleware is an important component of the system. It is between the reader and the enterprise applications. At present, many foreign famous software companies have developed its own RFID middleware; domestic companies also do a lot of research work in middleware.Supply chain management is one of the potential areas in RFID Technology. RFID supply chain model Emerged. RFID supply chain is a traditional supply chain which use RFID technology in the various aspects of supply chain. It provide a quickly, accurate methods to gather the information.More and more companies choose to use RFID supply chain. Requirement of the RFID supply chain middleware is also growing. The current middleware products do not facilitate the supply chain businesses to use. Most of these middleware products do not have independent reader network management module, can't manage readers effectively; only has simple filtering and pattern-matching function, can not meet the functional requirements of the supply chain.RFID middleware for supply chain applications should include the following functions: reader network management, enterprises in supply chain own a lot of RFID readers,the hardware devices and supported protocols are not all the same,and will add more and more new readers. That demands middleware is compatible with different readers, manage the reader's network dynamically, and provide functions of unified user interface, tag date processing and so on. Middleware must be able to cope with future requirement changes, such as changes on the relevant protocols and standards, modify or add new function modules and so on. These will not affect the entire architecture of middleware system and make the maintenances easy; Scalability. Enterprises in supply chain can configure the middleware functions dynamically according to their business needs; Basic functions of supply chain. Middleware should have basic common business logic such as product tracking, product information detection and so on.In this article, the"Shenzhen-Hong Kong Innovation Circle"major project"The Shenzhen-Hong Kong-based RFID integrated supply chain, food safety, and public information platform construction and demonstration applications"is as the background of research and application."It is a major research project in Guangdong Province, and using RFID technology for food supplied to Hong Kong by Shenzhen provides food safety management system, which includes monitoring food production, supply chain scheduling and sales management, is a typical RFID application environment.This paper combined Shenzhen and Hong Kong Food Safety Project; it proposes a supply-chain application for RFID middleware architecture. The architecture is composed by three parts, the Reader Management, application event handling layer and the supply chain business logic tier. The Reader Management is mainly responsible for the coordination of the reader, compatible with different kinds of readers, dealing with the original label data; the application event handling layer is responsible for the control of read and write cycles, access control, tag data filtering and aggregation, sent application of the cycle and event reports .The supply chain business logic tier is mainly responsible for the essential business functions such as product information back, product quality prediction.The reader layer study reader network management functions, reader is compatible with different types, provide a unified interface to read and write, Manually add and automatic registration of reader, network monitoring, including real-time monitoring of reader working status, error diagnosis, provides a simple scheduling mechanism; the raw data processing functions, dealing with the original tag which the reader read, removal redundant tag data, dealing with leakage reading, wrong reading, and other errors, then hence extract a valid tag data.The application event handling layer is the core of supply chain RFID middleware layer, this layer design to comply with EPCglobal's ALE specification, and the main functions are as follow: access control functions, Use of effective application of event handling mechanism for secure access layer, the legitimacy of the user authentication and authorization verification; provide a unified command interface to the higher application system; custom tag data capabilities, allowing the higher user-defined data, these fields are stored in the user label area and based on the field the user can quickly access the tag data area. Logic reader management capabilities, logical reader is a collection of physical reader, mapping multiple physical into a logical reader, make data collection and processing more easily. Event processing is the key of event handling layer, and responsible for the application event handling. It filters the tag data which is translated form the Reader network layer and aggregations data. Resulting in an application-level event for the users, and provide event subscription and event report generation functions; send reports function, it sends reports to subscribers using synchronous or asynchronous way. The report content tag data and detail in formations such as execution time, period initial conditions and ending conditions and so on.The supply chain business logic layer is responsible for providing supply chain business functions, including automatic and intelligent detection of early warning capabilities. The auto-trace obtains product information through labels, and track the implementation of backward and forward traceability operations。This get all the information and data of the product flow in the supply chain, automatic trace feature tree model achieved through the back. Intelligent detection of early-warning based on product information ,and intelligence test whether a product meet the required standards, then issued the warning information of unqualified products. Intelligent detection of early warning capabilities use artificial neural network BP algorithm.Finally, this paper implements a container-based supply chain application for RFID middleware prototype system, it is run on a JBoss server and use EJB3.0 technology to development this middleware. After that this paper takes a simple test for the system performance. Currently the middleware has been applied to the Shenzhen-Hong Kong food safety project, the application results show that the middleware totally meet the food security supply chain applications.