Enabling intelligent, event-driven RFID and sensor networks
Radio frequency identification (RFID) and sensor technologies are rapidly becoming critical tools for turning asset location and environment data into valuable business information. Companies in all industries – healthcare, manufacturing, retail and transportation, among others – know that creating intelligent, event-driven networks of RFID and sensor devices offer them greater visibility and control of business assets and processes, thus increasing productivity, profits and competitive advantage.
Still, today’s developers and system integrators face numerous challenges in providing their companies and customers with efficient, cost-effective solutions that leverage and integrate RFID, sensor and location tracking data.
Today’s obstacles include:
- Many diverse device types, with differing functionality, usage and interfaces
- Emerging, but still fragmented, standards
- The need to manage and monitor distributed sensor networks
- Hardware in many locations throughout the enterprise
- Abundance of raw, unprocessed data generated by sensor networks
- Inability to simulate or troubleshoot production environments
- Difficulty in adding business intelligence to asset location data
RFID Anywhere™ integrates business logic and processes with a variety of automatic data collection and sensor technologies, including passive and active RFID readers, RFID printers, barcode scanners, mobile devices, PLCs, location tracking systems, environmental sensors and feedback mechanisms. This powerful software infrastructure simplifies the development, deployment, configuration and management tasks for highly distributed, multi-site, intelligent sensor networks, and abstracts the interaction with the network of devices. By using RFID Anywhere, sensors are able to work together as an intelligent network by combining, organizing and coordinating these technologies through a common management structure, advanced feature set and event-driven development framework.
RFID Anywhere:
- Supports distributed configurations and edge processing, allowing multiple locations to collect and process sensor data even if the rest of the enterprise is unavailable to receive it
- Implements business logic and filters data at the edge through an event-driven architecture, ensuring fast response times and allowing only the most valuable and useful data to flow to the enterprise
- Aggregates all components under one common management interface, so you can view and manage all configuration properties regardless of the component type or sensor functionality
- Exposes a service-oriented architecture (SOA) layer to simplify application development and enterprise integration
- Provides a runtime environment that can host multiple business processes and rules at the same time, allowing multiple business scenarios to be addressed with a single solution.
