RFID data analysis using tensor calculus for supply chain management

• Authors: Roberto De Virgilio;Franco Milicchio
• Venue: Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
• Year: 2011

In current trends of consumer products market, there is a growing significance of the role of retailers in the governance of supply chains. RFID is a promising infrastructure-less technology, allowing to connect an object with its virtual counterpart, i.e., its representation within information systems. However, the amount of RFID data in supply chain management is vast, posing significant challenges for attaining acceptable performance on their analysis. Current approaches provide hard-coded solutions, with high consumption of resources; moreover, these exhibit very limited flexibility dealing with multidimensional queries, at various levels of granularity and complexity. In this paper we propose a general model for supply chain management based on the first principles of linear algebra, in particular on tensorial calculus. Leveraging our abstract algebraic framework, our technique allows both quick decentralized on-line processing, and centralized off-line massive business logic analysis, according to needs and requirements of supply chain actors. Experimental results show that our approach, utilizing recent linear algebra techniques can process analysis efficiently, when compared to recent approaches. In particular, we are able to carry out the required computations even in high memory constrained environments, such as on mobile devices. Moreover, when dealing with massive amounts of data, we are capable of exploiting recent parallel and distributed technologies, subdividing our tensor objects into sub-blocks, and processing them independently.