by Patrick Poullie, Thomas Bocek and Burkhard Stiller

NFC tags and transceivers are ubiquitous and well supported. Like many academic research groups, the Communication Systems Group CSG of the University of Zürich owns many physical devices, which are required for research and teaching. Traditionally, a printed, human-readable inventory and attached labels have been used to keep track of these devices. A new inventory approach was developed with the aim of simplifying the data acquisition using an NFC tag-based system supported by an Android application. This approach was implemented, tested, and used productively. However, due to technical difficulties - namely, a poor response of NFC tags on metallic material - the NFC-based inventory system did not simplify data acquisition and consequently, the NFC-based inventory system was changed back to the label-based system.

TrakChain Estimates Costs for Track and Trace in the Internet of (many) Things

by Miguel L. Pardal and José Alves Marques

The TrakChain assessment tools take a description of a physical supply chain – relevant locations, how many goods are received, how often, etc. – and estimate the performance of track and trace queries in a modelled traceability system, providing predictions of how much processing and storage will be required for the working system. The tools were developed at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal and were evaluated using a Pharmaceuticals supply chain case study.