RFID and Automatic Identification Focus: Our Weekly Feature Article on Topics of Interest to those Using or Considering RFID or other Auto ID Technologies  
 
 
  - May 20, 2008 -  

RFID: The EPC Vision – Then and Now

  
 

2003 EPC Roadmap Laid Out Compelling Vision – but in Retrospect, Projection of Industry-wide Networks was Way too Far Ahead of Reality; Our Take on How Things Have Turned Out

  
 

 

SCDigest Editorial Staff

SCDigest Says:
Tag costs have dropped, but not to the mythical “5-cent tag” level that was promoted as a sort of holy grail.

Click Here to See Reader Feedback

In response to our story last week on the success of “closed-loop” RFID systems (see No Surprise – It’s Easier to Implement Closed-Loop RFID Systems than those Requiring Multi-Party Involvement), reader Marcel van Trier of PricewaterhouseCoopers wrote to say that he agrees that this should not be a surprise – and that from the start, the vision of Electronic Product Code (EPC) projected many users would begin with closed-loop deployments, in which a single company controls all aspects of the system.

“Closed-loop systems offer the opportunity to trial-and-error your solution and test diferent scenarios or technologies, without burdening your trading partners,” van Trier said.

He referenced a 2003 document from Global Commerce Initiative – a group affiliated with GS1/EPCglobal, that laid out the long-term EPC vision.

“This document describes a strategy towards the EPC global vision, which is, in fact, open networks. And, surprise surprise, it states that the best strategy towards this vision is starting with a closed-loop system and an interna,l EPC-based infrastructure,” van Trier added.

So, SCDigest decided to have a look at that report, titled The GCI EPC Roadmap, to compare how the vision and reality have played out.

That 2003 documents sites a number of key foundational components for the EPC network, which we list below, along with some commentary of where things stand today.

  • Inexpensive tags and readers that conform to standards.

Reader prices continue to decline, and probably today are not a significant barrier to system deployment, though, in some scenarios requiring large numbers of readers, the total cost can cause problems with ROI. Reader costs continue to decline, and companies such as Mojix have released new approaches to reader networks that can potentially shrink reader costs for large networks dramatically.

(RFID and Automatic Identification Article - Continued Below)

  
 
CATEGORY SPONSOR: SOFTEON

 
 
 

Tag costs have dropped, but not to the mythical “5-cent tag” level that was promoted as a sort of holy grail. In Wal-Mart’s compliance program, there was never enough scale to apply tags in manufacturing, so its suppliers also had to bear significant costs to apply the tags in distribution. So, in total, we have not reached “inexpensive” tags.

Both readers and tags, especially since the release of the EPC “Gen 2” standard, are standards-based and largely interoperable between different manufacturers.

  • Minimum information stored on the tag. Under the pure EPC vision, the only information stored on the tag would be the EPC number.

This is largely how EPC adoption has been handled, though many are also looking to put additional data on the tags, especially given the problems with establishing a public “object naming service” (ONS) – see below.

  • The use of software — called a savant — as a connecting layer between the reader and applications to filter the EPC data and pass on only appropriate product movement information to application systems.

Whatever it is called (and almost no one now refers to a “savant”), data filtering and other techniques at the reader level enable just the meaningful data to be passed on to appropriate business applications. This turned out to be a very easy thing to do.

  • Information related to each object securely stored on a public network with the appropriate security controls. It can be accessed through an object naming service (ONS) that points to a computer, where the information about the object is held. The EPC information service (EPCIS) on that computer provides a description of the product in the physical markup language (PML).

The ONS concept has basically gone nowhere, as most companies want to manage their own RFID-based data. Whether we will ever see anything like an ONS is not clear.

  • Interoperable tags and readers based on an open, global standards-based system, ensuring that any EPC-compliant tag can be read by any EPC-compatible reader, and that a tag applied in one country can work in another country.

Largely realized, though there were some concerns about a separate Chinese RFID standard.




The document does project three types of EPC systems:

  • An “internal network” (which can be thought of as “closed loop”)
  • A “trading partner-to-trading partner” network – the initial Wal-Mart model, in which trading partners would share EPC-based data
  • An “industry-wide” EPC network, in which any participant could easily plug into a network that stores EPC-based data for that industry.

To date, a relatively small number of companies have established broad “internal,” EPC-based networks. Trading partner-based networks have been even slower to get off the ground, and public networks seem unlikely for many years.

Still, the EPC supply chain vision from 2003 sounds appealing: “Imagine a world in which every object can be sensed as it moves and can trigger a response that can be interpreted and acted on at great speed and without human intervention.”

We’ll get there someday.

What’s your reaction to this look back at the 2003 EPC vision document? How much progress is being made towards the vision? Will we ever see a public RFID network? Let us know your thoughts at the Feedback button below.

  
     
Send an Email
     
     
.