A Domain Engineering Process for RFID Systems Development in Supply Chain

Abstract

According to the Supply-Chain Council (1997), the supply chain encompasses every effort involved in producing and delivering a final product or service, from the supplier's supplier to the customer's customer. Supply Chain Management (SCM) includes managing supply and demand, sourcing raw materials and parts, manufacturing and assembly, warehousing and inventory tracking, order entry and order management, distribution across all channels, and delivery to the customer. In this context of several sources of information exchanging data dynamically in supply chain, the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) appears as a technology able to identify objects such as manufactured goods, animals, and people. Thus, the goal of the RFID technology in supply chain management is to guarantee interoperability providing, for example, accurate and real-time information on inventory of the organizations, product recalls and communications among supply chain participants. On the other hand, the RFID-based systems used in supply chain management were not considered by a specific software development process. In this scenario, a process is important and necessary to define how an organization performs its activities, and how people work and interact in order to achieve their goals. In particular, processes must be defined in order to ensure efficiency, reproducibility and homogeneity (Almeida, 2007). There are several definitions on software process (Osterweil, 1987), (Pressman, 2005), and (Sommerville, 2006). According to Ezran et al. (2002) software processes refer to all the tasks necessary to produce and manage software, whereas reuse processes are the subset of tasks necessary to develop and reuse assets (Ezran et al., 2002). The adoption of either a new, well-defined, managed software process or a customized one is a possible facilitator for success in reuse programs (Morisio et al., 2002). In supply chain domain, many scenarios and processes are repeatable among supply chain participants (sub-domains), for example, inventory management, shipment and delivery of the goods, and localization of a product. In this sense, software reuse – the process of creating software systems from existing software rather than building them from scratch – is a key aspect for improving quality and productivity in the software development. O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w .in te ch w eb .o rg