DATA WAREHOUSING FOR RFID

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a technology which is used to identify objects with the help of radio waves. RFID technology is used in various fields like hospitals, supply chain, asset management, security etc. RFID technology plays a major role in companies as they can optimize business processes and reduce operational costs.  

Every industry deals with activities such as preparing ledgers, invoice, quantity sold as well as purchased inventory, in-patient billing, maintaining accounts, shipping address, client address and so on. These activities act as very important repository system that is used to run businesses. Similar kind of information is stored in operational systems but this operational system can store only current data. Thus, these operational systems can only helps us in making day to day decisions considering the current data, it doesn’t store the past information which is essential for any organization to analyze and compare its past performance with the current performance. Operational systems do not help us in taking the appropriate and accurate decisions, which can only be taken after viewing all the past record and the current record.

This limitation of operational systems was overcome with the new concept called DATA WAREHOUSE which is a computing environment where user can find information, an environment where user are directly in touch with the data they need which is further used to make better decisions .

In all businesses, government and educational fields data is stored in data warehouse with the help of RFID technology which enables availability of accurate data from appropriate location and in specific time constraint with the help of RFID readers .The RFID data is stored in the form of tuples with the pattern (EPC, LOC and TIME).

RFID technology uses a technique that particularly deals with electronic data collection and transmission. These systems uses electromagnetic waves, which are nothing but the radio frequencies of the range from 10-30 Kilohertz (VLF) to 30-300 Gigahertz (UHF).There are some typical applications that might have the range from 50 Kilohertz to 2.5Gigahertz.RFID software is used to process data sent to and received from Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices such as RFID readers, writers, and printers. There are many different types of RFID software. These softwares enable:

• ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)
• Data Warehouse Management System.
• Compatible to be used with SCM (Supply Chain Management).
• Used in System Integration.

RFID software enables warehouses to produce RFID tags and RFID labels that meet electronic product code (EPC) and U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) standards.Product information such as the stock keeping unit (SKU) and universal product code (UPC) are used to produce EPC complaint global trade identification numbers (GTIN), 14-digit data structures that identify products at a consumer-unit level.These RFID softwares are basically designed to run on operating systems- Solaris® 9 or 10, Windows® Server 2003,Red Hat Enterprise Linux®, etc.In Warehousing, RFID data which is generated can be seen in the form of tuples. Tuples are usually stored in time sequence, time is generated when the reading takes place and it also contains the location where the RFID reader has scanned the object (unique identifier) that is read by the RFID tag. So in RFID, a group of tuples can be seen as (EPC, LOC, TIME) where EPC is unique identifier that identifies a specific item, LOC is location, TIME is time (fixed or continuous).

Warehousing of RFID includes extraction of accurate data from appropriate location and in specific time constraint. All these operations under warehousing are controlled by the WMS (Warehouse Management System).

Renu Yadav

Assistant Professor (BCA)