rPlatform - The RFID Platform

rPlatform provides a comprehensive foundation for collecting, managing and integrating RFID data with enterprise information. Conforming to EPCglobal standards, it supports an open and extensible architecture to disseminate RFID data across the enterprise and trading partners. It offers a distributed environment that can scale in tandem with increasing RFID adoption. The platform consists of the following three components.

Adapter
Adapter provides a uniform interface to disparate hardware devices. It supports filtering, smoothing and event generation to eliminate unnecessary RFID traffic and publish only business relevant data. It supports both EPCglobal and IETF standards for readers. It provides a pluggable architecture to easily integrate new readers as they emerge in the market. It can be embedded inside a reader or can be used stand-alone.

Analyzer
Analyzer collects filters and aggregates RFID data from multiple adapters and analyzes them for business relevance. An application can specify what sort of RFID data it is interested in and the analyzer will monitor real-time traffic to deliver only data of interest to the application. It supports a distributed architecture to provide reliability and scalability necessary to support massive volume RFID data generated in production scenarios. As it conforms to EPCglobal standards, it is interoperable with existing RFID applications.

Enterprise Business Server
Enterprise Business Server collects meaningful RFID information from Analyzer, associates appropriate business semantics and integrates with enterprise systems and trading partners. It supports real-time integration with the external world through EPCglobal Network. It stores RFID data in a relational database and makes it available for historical analysis. Its event based modeling provides a convenient framework to capture the business requirements. Business Server also includes the event transformation engine which translates the lower level RFID data into usable business events.

Process Integration Engine
Process Integration Engine provides the connectivity to the enterprise systems. Process engine is a fully scalable with support for BPEL and WSDL standards. Combined with process engine, rPlatform provides the integration capability from edge to the enterprise.

rPlatform Architecture
Diagram below describes the architecture of rPlatform.