A Study Of RFID Data Processing Based On A Path Encoding Scheme In Supply Chain

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is thought to bring some great changes to supply chain management. As the cost of tags getting lower, item-level tracing systems are used by attaching tags to every single item. However, the data generated by the systems are huge, incorrect and have implicit semantics. Our task is to extract useful information from those data.Unlike other data, RFID data generated in supply chain management are about the information for the movement trajectories of products between different locations. To manage these trace data efficiently, many encoding methods and data models are proposed. An encoding scheme based on prime numbers are designed which encodes the path information by using some mathematical principles. This encoding scheme greatly saves the storage space and can process the queries efficiently.However, the prime encoding method cannot encode the paths with cycles, which means, if a location is passed by a product for more than once, the encoding method cannot be accomplished. To solve this problem, an improved path encoding scheme for cycling path is proposed in this paper. The proposed method uses the basic idea of the prime encoding method, and adds the ability of processing the paths when a location is passed repeatedly. It can be proved by mathematical analysis that the result of encoding result is definite without any loss of information and the path information can be easily computed by decoding procedure. The problem of long paths which may lead to overflow of the data type for codes is also solved by dividing the path and applying the improved method to each fragment of the path. A system for management of RFID data is built and the proposed encoding method is put into use. We also design some details with respect to the storage scheme and query processing method for the system.Experiments are conducted from four aspects to evaluate the performance of the approach. The results show that the performance of the improved method is not greatly impacted by the extra calculation. To sum up, the proposed scheme improves the generality of the basic encoding method and maintains its high efficiency.The main work and contribution of this paper concludes:1. Review the existing work about management of RFID data, especially some RFID data models.2. Propose a path encoding method for paths with cycles based on a prime encoding scheme, and prove its feasibility by mathematical analysis.3. Design a system for RFID data management. Design some algorithms and build the relational database scheme in RDBMS to provide an efficient storage scheme. Provide methods to process the queries.4. Design some experiments from four aspects according to the characteristic of the proposed method. The result of comparison verifies the efficiency of the improved encoding scheme.