BRIDGE project delivers General Requirements and a High-Level Design for Discovery Services
Discovery Services (also called “serial-level look-up services”) enable users to find multiple sources of information about an individual physical object that is identified by a specific Electronic Product Code™ (EPC). Users can then request access to more detailed information from each source, e.g. via queries to the EPC Information Service of each information provider. The two public deliverables developed in the frame of the BRIDGE project are expected to have great impact in the development of global standards for the use of RFID technology in the supply chain and the access of data related to RFID. They represent a very significant development in the move from localised RFID pilots to a truly global supply chain with ambient intelligence. After conducting a survey of user requirements and integration requirements, the team developed a design for a data model and interfaces for Discovery Services, both for queries and publishing of records to Discovery Services. The design document also includes a technical comparison of various alternative approaches to Discovery Services. These outcomes have already been submitted to several standard groups working on Discovery Services. The team working on these deliverables in the context of the BRIDGE project is led by the Spanish organisation AT4 wireless and includes the Auto-ID Labs Cambridge and ETH Zurich, British Telecom, SAP, AIDA Centre and GS1 UK. "Our vision is that Discovery Services will be an essential component to develop track and trace applications in a complex multi-vendor scenario. However standardization is a key issue to achieve wide deployment, and the work done in our work package can be considered as a noteworthy contribution at this early stage of the standardization process", said Miguel Angel Guijarro (AT4 wireless). Further to these deliverables, research is being conducted to build on this work on Discovery Services: a working group led by the Auto-ID Labs Cambridge focuses on enhanced track and trace models for serial level control, and another, led by British Telecom looks at the security requirements and solutions at all levels of the EPCglobal Network architecture. “The software prototype that is currently being designed and built by our working group will make use of Discovery Services and EPC Information Services to gather events from across the entire supply chain or product lifecycle. It will then use the accumulated data and user-defined rules to ‘learn’ the flow patterns for objects and use probabilistic algorithms to further enhance and refine this observation data to predict where individual objects are now, where they will be seen next – and also to provide pro-active alerting about delays and deviations”, said Mark Harrison , Director of Auto-ID Labs Cambridge. "In order to control and protect the exchange of information in the context of Discovery Services, we are developing flexible policy-driven security frameworks to enable innovative services and applications over shared information" added Andrea Soppera of British Telecom on behalf of the security working group. BRIDGE public deliverables are available for download on the BRIDGE website: http://www.bridge-project.eu(opens in new window) Among the latest results and deliverables from BRIDGE is the production of a series of multimedia animations on the basic principles and benefits of the EPC/RFID technology along the supply chain. These animations are available as a special feature on the BRIDGE website.
Keywords
Countries
Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, United Kingdom