Enhancing business process automation by integrating RFID data and events

Abstract

Business process automation is one of the major benefits for utilising Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. Through readers to RFID middleware systems, the information and the movements of tagged objects can be used to trigger business transactions. These features change the way of business applications for dealing with the physical world from mostly quantitybased to object-based. Aiming to facilitate business process automation, this paper introduces a new method to model and incorporate business logics into RFID edge systems from an object-oriented perspective with emphasises on RFID's event-driven characteristics. A framework covering business rule modelling, event handling and system operation invocations is presented on the basis of the event calculus. In regard to the identified delayed effects in RFID-enabled applications, a two-block buffering mechanism is proposed to improve RFID query efficiency within the framework. The performance improvements are analysed with related experiments. © Springer-Verlag 2009.