Application-level System and Tool Support for Auto-ID Application Development

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems have begun to find greater use in the consumer object identification market, in industrial automation, and in mobile asset and supply chain management, in a wide range of industries such as retail, pharmaceutical, and defense. The term automatic identification (Auto-ID) applications is used to generalize RFID applications and includes other Auto-ID technologies such as barcode or Bluetooth. More complex Auto-ID applications also use sensor technologies not only to identify objects but also to track their state (e.g. temperature sensors to ensure quality of perishable goods). Bridging the gap between the physical world of objects (e.g., products and logistical units) and the digital world of IT systems to improve existing business processes is the main driver of the widespread RFID adoption. However, even if the gap between the physical and the digital world is bridged, there is still a gap between applications or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems on one side and Auto-ID systems on the other. Application developers are faced with several challenges: Instead of concentrating on the application or business logic they have to deal with Auto-ID specific details such as readers, tags, or specific error sources. They also have to duplicate code when developing a new application for capturing Auto-ID data from readers, for filtering and aggregating Auto-ID data to increase their accuracy, for providing persistent storage and querying capabilities, and for reacting to business events such as the arrival of a shipment. To facilitate the development of Auto-ID applications, this thesis provides concepts, programming models, building blocks and tools that abstract from Auto-ID specific details and provide the necessary services and the appropriate level of reuse. In particular, the contributions are: • an Auto-ID Object Model that abstracts from low-level Auto-ID and sensor concepts which provides the means for an application to model and represent its domain as the base for the application logic. The model focuses on the domain of Auto-ID applications, that is,