On RFID

Foreword

The “On RFID – The next step to the Internet of Things” conference and exhibition was held at Lisbon, Portugal on the 15^th and 16^th of November 2007.

The conference was organized by Link Consulting, UMIC and IAPMEI and was integrated in the Portuguese Presidency of the Council of the EU. The conference was a follow-up to a previous conference held on June 2007 in Germany.

I was fortunate to attend the event, including all plenary sessions and the technology innovation parallel sessions. Overall it was a very good conference and very well organized (with the exception of some occasional sound system issues). For my personal interest I would have liked more in-depth technical presentations, but it was still a worthwhile attendance.

Next I’ll share some of my notes with you about presentations I found interesting. Like all selections, I’m sure I left out some important things, but hopefully not too many. I also left out the speaker's professional titles, as I want to write in a more informal style and I don’t have accurate information for everyone.

Day one

Opening session

In his welcome address, Alves Marques greeted all the attendants and underlined the great public interest and participation in the conference and outlined the programme.

The Portuguese Secretary of State, Manuel Heitor, made the opening address structured around the relationships of RFID with people, knowledge and ideas as key to building a common RFID framework.
The European Commissioner Viviane Reding addressed the audience through a recorded video, mentioning the potential impact of RFID in all aspects of human life and stressing the importance of cooperation within Europe and with global partners as one country alone cannot solve all the problems, including the privacy and security issues.

Ten Hompel from IML Fraunhofer, Germany, relayed a message from the German government that mentioned the importance of preserving European interest in regard to the management of RFID data, and the necessary attention to SMEs’ (Small, Medium Enterprises) RFID adoption barriers, as SMEs are play a very important role in European innovation.

Next Mr. Hompel started his personal message with some suggestions for RFID: disseminate information and best practices; take a light approach to regulation, trusting in self-regulation; solutions are application-specific, as they always involve trade-offs.

Mr. Hompel continued with a very interesting analogy from the Physics world of the past century, comparing the two opposing approaches to understanding the Atom: Bohr’s classic physics and Einstein’s relativity. He also mentioned Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Then he used the analogy to give his opinion on the correct approach to SCM (Supply Chain Management) systems: “Do not try to predict the unpredictable”; Production and logistics are non-deterministic and the only way to cope with this reality is using a service-oriented approach and letting service-chains come up in real-time. This approach also benefits from an agent based-approach to modeling complex, real-time systems. In my view however there has to be a special attention to exception handling and disaster scenarios in these more loosely coupled systems.

Security and Privacy: Does Europe need new rules for RFID?

(to be continued)