Incorporating business logics into RFID-enabled applications

Abstract

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology promises many benefits to business process automation with real-time context awareness and item level accuracy. Through readers to RFID middleware systems, the information and the movements of tagged objects can be used to trigger business transactions. With the aim to seamlessly incorporate RFID technology into business process automation, this paper investigates the deployment of business logics to RFID edge systems. A comprehensive framework is proposed to model business rules in an event-driven perspective on the basis of event calculus. This framework first elicits the business meaningful events from the large volume of raw RFID reads, and guides the behaviours and interactions of involved objects in response to the elicited events and the pre-defined business rules. The execution and functional invocations are enforced with RFID queries, where a two-block buffering mechanism is proposed to handle the identified delayed effects and thereby improve the RFID query efficiency. Experiments and analysis are conducted to discuss the query efficiency improvements and the scalability to more complex applications.