Object traceability graph: Applying temporal graph traversals for efficient object traceability

Abstract

EPC Information Services (EPCIS) is a de-facto standard for information systems for object traceability. Expert and intelligent systems complying with the standard reap benefits from its global interoperability, and thus every application can easily retrieve track and trace information of everyday-objects in an identical manner. However, existing systems are bound to go through scalability issues due to inevitable recursive queries because users are required to handle multiple transformation and aggregation of the objects instead of the systems. In the article, we propose an enhanced EPCIS system called Object Traceability Graph (OTG). The system applies a technique, temporal graph traversal, to resolve the issues. With the system, applications do not need to request recursive queries on their side. Instead, applications are able to represent their ad-hoc traceability queries in a single statement provided by the system. Then, the statement is interpreted and efficiently processed on the system side. In our evaluation, it is shown that our approach enhances the scalability of EPCIS systems by reducing the number of queries and the amount of data transmission. The proposed approach can be applied to existing expert and intelligent systems. Furthermore, we believe that an additional interface, abstracting our approach, is general enough to be included in the standard.