Implementation issues in RFID-based Anti-counterfeiting for Apparel Supply Chain

Abstract

With advancement in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), RFID-based track-and-trace anti-counterfeiting has attracted considerable research interests. Track-and-trace anti-counterfeiting requires a trustworthy electronic pedigree (e-pedigree) to ensure high product visibility. Continuous movements of large volumes of products along the supply chain would generate huge amounts of data, posing great challenges to system development and operation. As such, the front-end RFID data should be well-formatted to facilitate data capturing, filtering, and synchronization, so that the accumulated e-pedigree is complete and trustworthy for subsequent product authentication. In this paper, we present an innovative track-and-trace anti-counterfeiting system for apparel products, and discuss some key implementation issues, such as e-pedigree formatting, tag data processing, data synchronization, and traceability / visibility control. An e-pedigree data format for full traceability of apparel is proposed to support products authentication at item-level, products anti-lost at pallet-level, and products status prediction at batch-level. With this format, an automatic data synchronization mechanism is established to ensure e-pedigree integrity. This mechanism is integrated with a Tag Data Processing and Synchronization (TDPS) algorithm to create unique product identifiers (PID) for tagging individual apparel items and subsequently synchronize the e-pedigree and related data. Moreover, a parent-and-child containment relationship between items and cartoons is established and stored in the back-end database servers to maintain accuracy and integrity of the e-pedigree when mis-reading occur at product receiving at supply chain nodes. Lastly, to avoid possible leakage / falsification of e-pedigree data, an RBAC-based access control is proposed as an auxiliary module for the anti-counterfeiting system.