Smart Items in Real Time Enterprises

Abstract

This chapter deals with the idea of how—as we call them—“smart items” can contribute to the overall vision of the real time enterprise by utilizing ubiquitous computing (UC) technologies. First, an overview of functionality is given that smart items can offer to improve enterprise business processes. The discussed capabilities making everyday objects or goods “smart” are grouped into categories called Information Storage, Information Collection, Communication, Information Processing and Performance of Actions. This is followed by an overview of ways in which enterprise businesses processes can profit from these capabilities. The consistent and reliable integration of smart items into traditional enterprise software systems requires the implementation of a middleware layer. An important goal of the middleware is to hide technology specifics of ubiquitous computing systems from the applications that rely on them. The approach described is service orientation which allows the consistent encapsulation and standardized usage of the required functionality in a given business process.