Intelligent Steel Inventory Tracking with IoT / RFID

Digital Business or D-Business is an environment where nearly all physical and virtual assets in the value chain are digital. Intelligent objects, are a part of end-to-end processes. Business is conducted by intelligent agents making decisions based on context provided by the IoT - Internet of Things. In order to improve productivity in the value chain, a Steel Mill decided to automate one of its warehouse using RFID technology. The project described in this paper considers the historical benefits described in many business and use cases of RFID in several industries around product logistics in the last years and the vision D-Business. An existing RFID solution architecture based on the reference EPCGlobal/GS1 framework was modified in order to be extended to the IoT domain to fulfil these requirements. The project environment, the RFID automation strategies and the innovative IoT solution architecture are presented.