Developing RFID Database Models for Analysing Moving Tags in Supply Chain Management

The applications of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) have become more important and diversified in recent years due to the lower cost of RFID tags and smaller tag sizes. One promising area for applying the technology is in Supply Chain Management (SCM) in which the manufacturers need to analyse product and logistic information in order to get the right quantity of products arriving at the right time to the right locations. In this paper, we present a holistic framework that supports data querying and analysis of raw datasets obtained from different RFID collection points managed by supply chains. First, the framework provides repair mechanisms to preprocess raw RFID data from readers. Second, we present a database model to capture SCM information at various abstraction levels such as items, time and locations, and then discuss the use of SQL query language to manipulate RFID databases. Finally, we present a graph data model called a Tag Movement Graph (TMG) to capture the moving information of tagged objects.