RFID data cleaning for shop floor applications

Abstract

In several case studies we found that shop-floorshop-floor applications in manufacturing pose special challenges to cleaning RFID data. The underlying problem in many scenarios is the uncertainty about the exact location of observed RFID tags. Simple filterfilter See data filter data filter s provided in common middleware solutions do not cope well with these challenges. Therefore we have developed an approach based on maximum-likelihood estimationmaximum- likelihood estimation to infer a tag's location within the reader range. This enables improved RFID data cleaningdata cleaning in a number of application scenarios. We stress the benefits of our approach along exemplary application scenarios that we found in manufacturing. In simulationssimulations and experiments with real world data we show that our approach outperforms existing solutions. Our approach can extend RFID middleware or reader firmware, to improve the use of RFID in a range of shop-floor applications. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.