Telecommun Syst DOI 10.1007/s11235-013-9746-6 A policy-driven RFID event management framework Hyungjin Ahn · Kwanghoon Kim © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Abstract As a tool of item management, the primary goal of RFID middleware is to transmit a series of filtered tag data to the RFID-based applications, and so it has to provide a means for specifying event-constraints to refine and filter the raw data from the associated RF readers. However, the current specifications, such as EPCIS’s ALE, ISO/IEC’s SSI and other vendor-specific specifications, are too circumstan- tial to be understood by the application developers, and also they have to get acquainted with the technological details of those various types of specifications. To alleviate these dif- ficulties, this paper proposes a referential framework con- sisting of unified RFID event-constraint specification and its managerial mechanisms, and we dub it a policy-driven RFID event management framework. The essential components of the framework are an XML-based RFID event management policy definition language and a policy exchanging proto- col. Through the proposed framework, it is expected for the RFID-based application developers to be able to easily spec- ify their event-constraints without acquainting with the tech- nological details of the current specifications. Keywords RFID middleware · RFID event-constraints · SSI application interfaces · EPCIS application level event · Event policy This paper is the extended version of [14] published and selected as one of the outstanding papers in ICUT2009. H. Ahn Platform Services Department, Central R&D Laboratory, Korea Telecom, Seoul, South Korea e-mail: hjahn07@kt.com K. Kim (B ) Department of Computer Science, Kyonggi University, Suwon, South Korea e-mail: kwang@kgu.ac.kr 1 Introduction In this paper, we conceive a unified and highly abstracted RFID event-constraints management system, and by which the RFID application developers are able to not only eas- ily define their RFID event-constraints, but also enhance the understandability of RFID middleware internals from the user’s point of view. This conceived system conclu- sively can be embodied from a systematic framework that is proposed in this paper and dubbed ‘policy-driven RFID event management framework.’ In other words, we would adopt the basic concept of policy [20, 21] to effectively ex- press RFID event-constraints, and devise a series of mech- anisms and an XML-based language to define and control the event-constraint policies. Furthermore, from the fields’ experiences and the survey reports [1, 2, 7], we have also realized that the existing REID events management sys- tems supporting EPCglobal ALE 1 [4, 5], ISO/IEC 24791-2 2 [12, 13] and the other vendor-specific (non-standards) spec- ifications have been suffering from the deficiency issues of usability, transparency, effectiveness and flexibility; Conse- quently, these issues ought to be the requirements that the referential framework proposed in this paper should satisfy. Particularly, the usability issue is directly related with the degree of complexity on the RFID events management spec- ifications. At present, it is hard to say that almost all RFID events management tools provide an easy way of event cycle definition interfaces so as for the application developers to be able to simply and conveniently use. Therefore, it is very important to provide useful RFID events management spec- ifications with intuitive interfaces. And, the transparency is- sue has something to do with the differences among the 1 Application Level Events Spec. 2 ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 31/WG 4 SSI Part 2: Data Management.