Supply Chain sensor support by integrating the OGC Sensor Web Enablement and the EPC Network architectures

The existing standards dealing with Auto-ID data for supply chain scenarios do not integrate sensor information from the products that are being monitored. In particular, although a number of efforts have been undertaken in the last few years to incorporate sensor data inside the EPCglobal Network, its has proven to be a slow process due to both the complexity of the task and the standardization processes themselves. On the other hand, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has been developing a complete set of Internet-based sensor standards under the name of the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE). This set of standards is built on a distributed architecture whose main components perform similar functionalities to those found in the EPC Network. Based on this observation, this paper discusses a different approach to the integration of sensor information into the EPCglobal Network which consists of building an application level layer to connect the EPC Network components with those of the OGC SWE. We show how this approach can provide sensor+auto-ID-enabled supply chains with little or no changes to the existing standards and that this can support some advanced functionalities such as ambient sensors or multiple sensors per product. This research was supported in part by the EU IST Sixth Framework (FP6) project BRIDGE (Building RFID Solutions for the Global Environment) under contract number 033546