event[s]

Efficient business processes in logistics can only be realized with efficient enterprise information systems. Current software architectures do not target event-based systems, because they are based on a process-oriented control flow, which is not sufficient for event-driven systems such as logistics applications. In recent years, Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) has been proposed as a new architectural paradigm for event-based applications. The main idea lies in the processing of events as the central architectural concept.

The objective of the project eventS (Event-Driven Architecture for Laboratory Logistics with RFID) is the development of a reference architecture for event-driven RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) applications. The key concept of the approach is to employ complex event processing (CEP) as the model for processing and managing of event-driven information systems. Event streams generated by RFID contain a large volume of different events, which must be transformed, classified, aggregated, evaluated, and appropriate actions must be initiated. Upper-level business processes can interpret the resulting complex events and react on them. The reference architecture enables the seamless integration of RFID event streams in upper-level business processes in real-time. Event-driven architectures can be seen as a dynamic complement to service-oriented architectures (SOA).

The usefulness of the reference architecture is investigates by means of a case study. We selected the tracking and localization of samples in large research laboratories using RFID as the domain of investigation