Implementation and testing of an EPCglobal-aware Discovery Service for item-level traceability

The item-level tracing requirements are quickly becoming a key issue in many application scenarios, in order to guarantee major transparency in products flow along the whole supply chain. The continuous evolution of auto-identification technologies, as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), and the asserting of new open international standards, as EPCglobal, will play a very important role in tracing and tracking systems. A key component of the EPCglobal network is represented by the Discovery Service that is not a standard yet. In this paper, we focus on an implementation of a scalable Discovery Service developed as an extension of the framework FossTrak, an open architecture that implements EPCglobal services and protocols. This extended architecture has been tested in a controlled laboratory environment simulating the whole pharmaceutical supply chain, where it is possible to appreciate advantages of a Discovery Service for item-level tracing.