Bridging Physical and Virtual Worlds: Complex Event Processing for RFID Data Streams

Abstract

Abstract. Advances of sensor and RFID technology provide significant new power for humans to sense, understand and manage the world. RFID provides fast data collection with precise identification of objects with unique IDs without line of sight, thus it can be used for identifying, locating, tracking and monitoring physical objects. Despite these benefits, RFID poses many challenges for data processing and management: i) RFID observations contain duplicates, which have to be filtered; ii) RFID observations have implicit meanings, which have to be transformed and aggregated into semantic data represented in their data models; and iii) RFID data are temporal, streaming, and in high volume, and have to be processed on the fly. Thus, a general RFID data processing framework is needed to automate the transformation of physical RFID observations into the virtual counterparts in the virtual world linked to business applications. In this paper, we take an event-oriented approach to process RFID data, by devising RFID application logic into complex events. We then formalize the specification and semantics of RFID events and rules. We demonstrate that traditional ECA event engine cannot be used to support highly temporally constrained RFID events, and develop an RFID event detection engine that can effectively process complex RFID events. The declarative event-based approach greatly simplifies the work of RFID data processing, and significantly reduces the cost of RFID data integration.

Deriving a unified fault taxonomy for event-based systems

“…Application areas include geospatial event processing [21], RFID-based product monitoring [72], or online fraud detection [21,60].…”

“…Aggregation functions, including simple aggregates (count, sum, average, minimum, maximum, etc.) or mathematical functions over event sequences (e.g., cross-correlation coefficients), are a vital foundation for defining and executing CEP business logic [60,72,75]. As indicated in Figure 6, faulty aggregation usually affects the business logic (e.g., when combining multiple correlated "item" events into a single "package" event in a warehouse [72]).…”

Semantic-Based RFID Data Management

“…The first one concerns run-time processing of data streams [16,17,18,19]. Most current approaches, however, track only very basic information, namely raw data produced by RFID readers.…”

RFID-assisted Product Delivery in Sustainable Supply Chains: A Knowledge-based Approach

“…Most current approaches for run-time processing of RFID data in supply chains [21,2] manage only very basic information, namely raw (EPC, location, time) triples produced by RFID readers, where EPC (Electronic Product Code) is the unique product identifier, while location and time mark each RFID reading event.…”