Data management is a key issue for any organization deploying RFID technology. Organizations that are deploying RFID systems will be quickly overwhelmed by a flood of data, unless they follow core principles for building an operational data management architecture. RFID readers will deliver large volumes of data which must be optimized for decision support applications of the business.
RFID architecture should embrace three central principles:
Develop an operational data management architecture which is a software system that captures events at the “edge” of the enterprise, where operational activity occurs, rather than in the center, where business oriented transaction processing occurs. This kind of data management and applied intelligence will become more prevalent as RFID adoption encourages companies to deploy intelligence at the point of operational activity.
Employ “Savant concentrators” that help control the flow and provide filtering and aggregation of event streams. Savants are distributed software systems developed to take data from an RFID reader, do some filtering, handle data point lookups, and send the information on to enterprise applications or databases. A Savant concentrator is a software component that will run on a server and apply intelligence to control the volume of data. It begins to address the problem that RFID will require gulps of bandwidth and access and storage such as never contemplated.
Create pipelines for data distribution. Increasing numbers of RFID readers will lead to more streams of data, which can quickly overwhelm the system. The way to handle the load is through pipeline processing. Pipelines separate streams of data to handle load and coordinate or process the data streams after they have been captured. To achieve additional scalability, you may need more than one concentrator distributed on a set of distributed machines, each one controlling a domain of RFID activity, distributed on multiple machines. You should create several pipelines from each concentrator. One will feed data into a local inventory database, one into a regional database, and one into financial applications.
Excerpts from RFID Journal guest column, “Build an Effective RFID Architecture”, February 2, 2004
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