Efficient storage scheme and query processing for supply chain management using RFID

As the size of an RFID tag becomes smaller and the price of the tag gets lower, RFID technology has been applied to a wide range of areas. Recently, RFID has been adopted in the business area such as supply chain management. Since companies can get movement information for products easily using the RFID technology, it is expected to revolutionize supply chain management. However, the amount of RFID data in supply chain management is huge. Therefore, it requires much time to extract valuable information from RFID data for supply chain management. In this paper, we define query templates for tracking queries and path oriented queries to analyze the supply' chain. We then propose an effective path encoding scheme to encode the flow information for products. To retrieve the time information for products efficiently, we utilize a numbering scheme used in the XML area. Based on the path encoding scheme and the numbering scheme, we devise a storage scheme to process tracking queries and path oriented queries efficiently. Finally, we propose a method which translates the queries to SQL queries. Experimental results show that our approach can process the queries efficiently. On the average, our approach is about 680 times better than a recent technique in terms of query performance.