Effective tracking and tracing in RFID-enabled supply chain networks

An RFID-enabled supply chain network facilitates tag tracing and tracking by means of sharing data in infrastructures of Information Services (IS) or Discovery Services (DS), throughout the whole life-cycle of a tag. EPCGlobal [1] is a widely applied standard for an RFID-enabled supply chain network, which defines the lifecycle management of an EPC tag, by describing the tracking and tracing issues in an EPCGlobal network. However, existing tracking and tracing algorithms do not consider complicated events defined in EPCGlobal standards, such as aggregation, disaggregation, recall, remark, etc. This paper defines an EPCGlobal standard compatible model of RFID-enabled supply chain network, which introduces EPC tag tracking and tracing in context of complicated events. We propose effective tracing and tracking algorithms based on that model. Experiments using simulated data demonstrate that the complexity of our algorithm is linear to n.