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Highlights From the Fifth RFID Academic Convocation
Post a Comment!In the panel discussion that followed, moderated by Bill Hardgrave, director of the RFID Research Center at the University of Arkansas, the group identified important research areas. These included:
The panelists also discussed how researchers could get involved, expressing their appreciation for the opportunity to present their industry requirements to the academic community. Ron Bone cited EPCglobal industry work groups as a good way to get involved, explaining that the "Jumpstart" pilot—in which 21 participants, including retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers, experimented with different products—resulted in a lot of questions where research could be helpful.
In addition, Leslie Hand reiterated the need for business cases illustrating how companies can drive value throughout the HLS supply chain. The convocation also examined EPCglobal Network issues that need to be researched. Scalability and security were identified as key areas on which to focus.
EPC Network Architecture Requirements
In the afternoon session on EPC networking, Steve Georgevitch from Boeing noted the importance of defining the EPC network architecture, a test methodology, scalability analysis and tools to estimate how much such an EPC network is going to cost. As is the case with pharma distribution, Steve emphasized the importance of speed in Boeing's manufacturing operations, which is reducing the days needed for 787 final assembly time in the factory from eleven down to three. Today 75% of Boeing's parts are already shipped by air. Boeing is both the largest exporter and a top-20 importer for the United States. Specific research issues identified included:
Richard Wishart, advisor to the Universal Postal Union (UPU), noted the evolution of postal services from closed loop to open loop RFID systems for their 10,000-RFID-reader network. Richard gave the example of the UPU's digital postmark plug-in for Microsoft Office 2007, which provides etrust and address validation.
Richard also expressed interest in RFID network security, scalability and reliability, noting the requirement for multiple registries in a distributed network of national postal services. As postal services look to advance into areas of individual package tracking, the research issues discussed in the morning session take on an even greater dimension of variability, so the need for standards is greater in the UPU.
Network architecture papers presented in response to industry requirements identified in prior convocations included a report from Professor John R. Williams, director of the Auto-ID Labs, introducing an EPC network simulator being built at MIT to provide fact-based performance data for the variety of e-pedigree and dynamic track-and-trace models being proposed. In addition, Yanlei Diao, Ph.D., from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, presented a proposal for "SPIRE, a scalable RFID Event Stream" architecture.
For more information, see Research Requirements Emerge From RFID Academic Convocation.
- Privacy and security: The general consensus was that information would become similar to credit-card data.
- Printable tags and organic semiconductors: Tag data memory and read speeds need to be improved before these technologies can present a viable alternative.
The panelists also discussed how researchers could get involved, expressing their appreciation for the opportunity to present their industry requirements to the academic community. Ron Bone cited EPCglobal industry work groups as a good way to get involved, explaining that the "Jumpstart" pilot—in which 21 participants, including retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers, experimented with different products—resulted in a lot of questions where research could be helpful.
In addition, Leslie Hand reiterated the need for business cases illustrating how companies can drive value throughout the HLS supply chain. The convocation also examined EPCglobal Network issues that need to be researched. Scalability and security were identified as key areas on which to focus.
EPC Network Architecture Requirements
In the afternoon session on EPC networking, Steve Georgevitch from Boeing noted the importance of defining the EPC network architecture, a test methodology, scalability analysis and tools to estimate how much such an EPC network is going to cost. As is the case with pharma distribution, Steve emphasized the importance of speed in Boeing's manufacturing operations, which is reducing the days needed for 787 final assembly time in the factory from eleven down to three. Today 75% of Boeing's parts are already shipped by air. Boeing is both the largest exporter and a top-20 importer for the United States. Specific research issues identified included:
- RFID for product lifecycle management and maintenance and repair operations, which is being led by Ken Porad in the Dreamliner project, with requirements for sustainment throughout 30 to 40 repair cycles over 50 years.
- Requirements for assessment of RFID's impact on existing data infrastructure—for instance, the number of transactions—as well as the impact on QoS for existing high-capacity concurrent engineering and design collaboration traffic flows.
- Visibility where RFID adds value—by contrast, 80% of this data should not need to be touched.
- How designing and implementing a test infrastructure currently may require additional network infrastructure, depending on the scale and criticality of the installation.
Richard Wishart, advisor to the Universal Postal Union (UPU), noted the evolution of postal services from closed loop to open loop RFID systems for their 10,000-RFID-reader network. Richard gave the example of the UPU's digital postmark plug-in for Microsoft Office 2007, which provides etrust and address validation.
Network architecture papers presented in response to industry requirements identified in prior convocations included a report from Professor John R. Williams, director of the Auto-ID Labs, introducing an EPC network simulator being built at MIT to provide fact-based performance data for the variety of e-pedigree and dynamic track-and-trace models being proposed. In addition, Yanlei Diao, Ph.D., from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, presented a proposal for "SPIRE, a scalable RFID Event Stream" architecture.
For more information, see Research Requirements Emerge From RFID Academic Convocation.
