FlexRFID: A design, development and deployment framework for RFID-based business applications

Abstract

The surge of RFID technology and ensuing competition in the RFID vendor market has increased the complexity of integration of RFID into current business processes. To address this problem, we present FlexRFID, a modeling template composed of state indicators, conditions, a simulation engine, and a device-independent deployment architecture for rapid prototyping of control applications using RFID and sensor hardware. The modeling technique is based on Moore Machines, a variant of finite state automata that allow states to be associated with outputs. With FlexRFID, users design applications by modeling business logic via transition of states based on sensor events. Outputs associated with individual states can handle operational characteristics of the application. In this article, we present the modeling methodology and demonstrate how organizations can develop complex applications easily using FlexRFID. We believe that the simplicity and flexibility of FlexRFID will assist in the development of RFID applications quickly even with limited resources. In addition, the parking entry application presented in our paper demonstrates FlexRFID's capability of being used in business application context, as well as in research, training, and teaching.

SafeRFID-MW: a RFID Middleware with runtime fault diagnosis

“…It is based on the notion of "event"; each received informationsuch as "tag ID" is translated into an event that contains more useful information such as "the place where the tag is read", "the date", "the reader ID that identified the tag", etc. FlexRFIDis a four-layer based architecture; hardware, application, processing and access management layers [20] [21]. FlexRFID operates as Sun RFID middleware with event processing.…”

Guest editorial: Advances in RFID technology

“…The authors propose a peer-to-peer (P2P) based architecture for event-based interaction and a new method for in-network query processing. The paper by Sengupta and Schiller, "FlexRFID: A Design, Development and Deployment Framework for RFID-based Business Applications" Sengupta and Schiller (2009), describes FlexRFID, a modeling template for rapid prototyping RFID applications. It also describes a real-life RFIDenabled car parking system developed by FlexRFID.…”