Product Line Architecture for RFID-Enabled Applications

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an established technology and has the potential, in a variety of applications, to significantly reduce cost and improve performance. RFID may dramatically change an organization's capacity to obtain real-time information concerning the location and properties of tagged people or objects. However, simply adding RFID to an existing process is a losing proposition. The entire process should be reconsidered in order to take advantage of real-time inventory data and the near real-time tracking and management of inventory. As RFID-enabled applications will fulfill similar tasks across a range of processes adapted to use the data gained from RFID tags, they can be considered as software products derived from a common infrastructure and assets that capture specific abstractions in the domain. That is, it may be appropriate to design RFID-enabled applications as elements of a product line. This paper discusses product line architecture for RFID-enabled applications. In developing this architecture, common activities are identified among the RFID-enabled applications and the variability in the common activities is analyzed in detail using variation point concepts. A product line architecture explicitly representing commonality and variability is described using UML activity diagrams. Sharing a common architecture and reusing assets to deploy recurrent services may be considered an advantage in terms of economic significance and overall quality.