A Peer-to-Peer RFID Resolution Framework for Supply Chain Network

Abstract

In a supply chain network, having up-to-date and prompt information is very crucial for minimizing, the bullwhip effect, inventory cost, out of stocks and time/cost of information sharing. Supply chain management is highly involved and complex process involving collaboration and information sharing between distributed partners. With the advent of RFID and new internet technologies, supply chain management process has been significantly streamlined. However, one of the major challenges in RFID based supply chain management is resolving the data stored in the RFID tags to the actual location of the data in the network. In this paper we evaluate several established techniques of RFID resolution in supply chain network and then propose a simple, yet novel approach for resolving RFID code to the actual data on the distributed supply chain network. The proposed approach is based on peer-to-peer (P2P) network, where each participant of supply chain is a node in the P2P network. These nodes form a structured P2P overlay network with each node having a partial view of other nodes. These nodes then act collaboratively in resolving RFID data and sharing business information.