A Framework for Supporting RFID-enabled Business Processes Automation

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is an established technology and has the potential, in a variety of applications, to significantly reduce cost and improve performance. As RFID-enabled applications will fulfill similar tasks across a range of processes adapted to use the data gained from RFID tags, they can be considered as software products derived from a common infrastructure and assets that capture specific abstractions in the domain. This paper discusses a framework that supports the development of RFID-enabled applications based on a business process family model (BPFM), explicitly representing both commonalities and variabilities. To develop this framework, common activities are identified from RFID-enabled applications and the variabilities in the common activities are analyzed in detail using variation point concepts. Through this framework, RFID data is preprocessed, and thus, RFID-enabled applications can be developed without having to process RFID data. Sharing a common model and reusing assets to deploy recurrent services may be considered an advantage in terms of economic significance and the overall product quality afforded.