Title: RFID enabled fully automated warehouse management: adding the business context

Authors: Panos Dimitropoulos, John Soldatos

Addresses: SENSAP SA, Hydras 2, GR-18346, Moschato, Greece. ' Athens Information Technology, 0.8km Markopoulo Ave., GR-19002, Peania, Greece

Abstract: The EPCglobal has recently ratified the EPC-IS standard, which insulates enterprise applications from understanding the details of how individual steps in a business process are carried out. However, few processes are described on the basis of this framework. In this paper, we present an overview of EPC-IS and accordingly leverage its event semantics to formulate the business context for prominent warehouse management (WM) processes. Specifically, we provide a fairly general description of WM business processes in terms of EPC-IS events. These events have been validated and used in the scope of realistic RFID deployments in different enterprises. Based on this experience we believe that these baseline descriptions could serve as templates for a wide range of RFID WM deployments. We also provide insights on how these descriptions could be used in the scope of a wider business process management framework, which could be amenable by graphical tools.

Keywords: radio frequency identification; RFID; EPC-IS standard; warehouse management; business process management; BPM; RFID middleware; warehousing automation; semantics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMTM.2010.035436

International Journal of Manufacturing Technology and Management, 2010 Vol.21 No.3/4, pp.269 - 288

Published online: 30 Sep 2010 *

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