Towards Event-Based Traceability in Provenance-Aware Supply Chains

The sharing of product information plays a central role in coordinating the actions and decisions undertaken by supply chain trading partners. The Electronic Product Code Information Service (EPCIS) is an EPCglobal standard, that aims to enable the sharing of serial-level product related information via the Electronic Product Code (EPC). Central to the EPCIS data model are events that describe specific occurrences in the supply chain. This paper presents a unified, provenance-aware framework, driven by Semantic Web standards and Linked data principles for representing and sharing EPCIS events on the Web of data. Event-based linked pedigrees are utilised as the basic artifact for exchanging knowledge in supply chains. Traceability is implemented through the automated generation and validation of linked pedigrees. We exemplify our approach using the pharmaceuticals supply chain and show how counterfeit detection is an implicit part of our traceability framework.