SAP campus receives plenty of dignitaries, distinguished scholars and scientists, around the year, who get their brains picked by SAP employees as well as SAP partners, thanks to the Co-Innovation Labs located at the SAP campus. This past Tuesday (22nd of Jan), there was a special presentation by John Williams, Director of the Auto-ID Lab at Massachusetts Institute if Technology (MIT). He was recently named, alongside Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, as one of the 50 most powerful people in Computer Networks. He is involved in a number of other projects for industry, including developing a supply chain simulator for SAP and researching RFID in the home for Microsoft.
The presentation was about the future, when the Internet of Things becomes reality, serialized data (typically RFID and/or barcode, based on EPCglobal, DOD/UID and other standards) can potentially be stored in millions of data repositories world-wide. In fact, large data volumes of serialized information may be coming soon, as the global healthcare industry moves towards deploying anti-counterfeiting standards as soon as 2009. Those data will be sent to enterprise applications through the EPC Network Infrastructure. The data volume, message volume, communication and applications with EPC Network Infrastructure will raise challenges to the scalability, security, extensibility and communication of current IT Infrastructure.
The potential there is enormous. Apparently, for instance, If 1/3rd of all cells phones incorporate RFID it would create 800 million users since there are just about 2.5 Billion Cell Phones in use around the world today. Here is what it would look like. Any item, no matter how small or insignificant would be trackable and at no additional cost. So basically this is tracking at a flat rate. Both Tracking and positioning of assetts and products is a huge deal. RFID in this changed form could work wonders to help that.
As opposed to the HF (High Frequency) that NFC works with today, there is now an UHF (Ultra High Frequency) that amenitizes the inconvenient.
Currently there is also a CVS Authentication (Code Verification System) which is being used by
Phillip Morris to track their cigarette packs in order to ensure that they don't end up in the wrong place and remain in the market that was intended for them. I did not know this but apparently there is a huge market for this because of the counterfeiting that goes on. According to John's data Counterfeiters are the third largest producers of cigarettes in the world.
Here is the very interesting bit among all the interesting ones:
MIT Research did some simulation for how much data is being managed by a registry on an hourly
or daily basis.
Here is what they found out:
The data transfer was about 772 GB to the registry every day.
That is about 9 MB/sec as far as bandwidth is concerned.
That blew me away! Maybe I don't have the perspective for huge amounts of data but that was way too much for me. And this is limited simulation. Can you possibly imagine what it would be like to track each and every piece of product that gets manufactured today.
John then switched over to talk about Concurrency and Coordination Runtime technique (CCR) that came from Microsoft and was created to counter the problems of debugging Distributed Computing. This is being used in a simulator which has been used to analyze the movement of around 20 million items per day through the healthcare supply chain. This simulator is a result of joint research b/w MIT and SAP.
The Idea with CCR (port based) is that the port is an abstraction, its not real.
As the Port is activated by data it runs on its own thread. More than 7 million ports can be handled on a simple dell 620 notebook. That is because this port is very lightweight. It does not consume CPU unless there is data and total weight is no more than 175 bytes.
John also talked about the Pedigree document as well which is the information containing document that has Data about the product as it goes through the supply chain with an RFID. It is this document that is set to have a facelift done with various strategies for e-Pedigree and the simulator discussed above.
All in all, a very enlightening session with bundles of good information. I spoke with John after the presentation and he seemed like an eager soul ready to connect. It is very gratifying to meet someone who gets so passionate about exciting stuff: IDEAS.
