RFID data processing in supply chain management using a path encoding scheme

RFID technology can be applied to a broad range of areas. In particular, RFID is very useful in the area of business, such as supply chain management. However, the amount of RFID data in such an environment is huge. Therefore, much time is needed to extract valuable information from RFID data for supply chain management. In this paper, we present an efficient method to process a massive amount of RFID data for supply chain management. We first define query templates to analyze the supply chain. We then propose an effective path encoding scheme that encodes the flows of products. However, if the flows are long, the numbers in the path encoding scheme that correspond to the flows will be very large. We solve this by providing a method that divides flows. To retrieve the time information for products efficiently, we utilize a numbering scheme for the XML area. Based on the path encoding scheme and the numbering scheme, we devise a storage scheme that can process tracking queries and path oriented queries efficiently on an RDBMS. Finally, we propose a method that translates the queries to SQL queries. Experimental results show that our approach can process the queries efficiently.