RFID-based Object-Centric Data Management Framework for Smart Manufacturing Applications

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) empowered technical revolution in manufacturing industry allows pervasive sensing and ubiquitous data access through the lifecycle of products. Although great efforts have been devoted to bridge the gap between industrial operations and information technologies, it still faces technical challenges to unobtrusively monitor the entire lifecycle of products via a boundary-less information flow for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) in highly adaptive manufacturing. This investigation presents an IoT sensing and networking framework for seamless data integration and ubiquitous access in smart manufacturing, focusing on product identification, data modeling, inter-phase data integration and ubiquitous data access. The highlights of this investigation are: (1) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and virtual Universal Unique Identifier (UUID) dual identifier online item-specific data integration, (2) RFID based online product object localization and unique identification, (3) object-centric manufacturing process modeling for inter-phase data integration, and (4) RFID/QR code encoding method for ubiquitous data sharing between product trading lifecycle phases. Finally, the implementation of presented methods in EU PickNPack food manufacturing production line is reported, and the practice has proved the feasibility and advantages.