Besides the R&D tasks, we also made efforts in application-oriented experiments and pilot studies. Especially, the popularity of Internet of Things (IOT) inspires us to seek more opportunities for adopting our technologies in the real applications. We are now working on two directions, postal application and food safety application. To each of them, our trust RFID based technologies and solutions will play an important role in providing secure logistics services and food surveillance.

Postal application

Although adopting RFID can significantly improve delivery and supply efficiency, security concerns remain due to the lack of sophisticated trust solutions for RFID enabling interoperable e-logistics. As one of the largest logistical organizations, Post will play an important role in the future e-logistics applications. To this end, postal enterprises have to address the major obstacles in providing a trust solution, such as the construction of RFID-enabled LSCM systems, cross-domain sharing and trustworthy collaboration, open and heterogeneous features of e-logistics systems. Our project can meet the urgent needs of postal enterprises for trust RFID enabled Interoperable e-logistics.

To demonstrate the soundness and effectiveness of our proposed technologies, we conduct a pilot study in the real e-logistics trading environment. The objective is to enable the trustworthy interoperable transactions across the different e-logistics trading systems. To this end, we coordinate with our partners to set up a pilot system that simulates the real e-logistics trading network. The pilot system will contain major factors of e-logistic application and reflect the real e-logistics systems. Based on the pilot system, we can conduct the pilot study to test the performance of our solutions in across-domain e-logistics transactions.

Food safety

Food safety is a big concern in modern society. Some serious accidents, such as the 2005 Hong Kong Malachite green scare, 2008 China milk scandal, and 2011 Taiwan toxic drink crisis, happened recently and caused a lot of troubles to the people’s health and public safety. Motivated by providing a trustworthy, traceable, efficient, and online food surveillance service, we conducted pilot study and experiment in Linan, Hangzhou, China, with a joint research project, Greenorbs. Greenorbs is a non-profitable research project for enabling an ecological surveillance in the forest, which can provide the food-source safety guarantee in the food supply chain.

It collects various data including temperature, humidity, illumination, and carbon dioxide titer. The collected information will be used for the surveillance from the source of food production. For example, as a typical Chinese food material, bamboo shoots are largely needed in China. The planting, collection, storage, process, and transportation procedures of bamboo shoots require effective monitoring and trustworthy management. We deploy wireless sensors in above procedures. The sensors will collect the environment information and transfer to the needed data for backend process and monitoring. We also adopt our proposed trust solution to support the trustworthy surveillance and management in the entire food supply chain.

Recently, we are also working on the next generation of embedded sensing and tagging device, sensing tag. This kind of tag combines the advantages of wireless sensors and RFID tags. Especially, some of them do not need battery. It will employ the capacitance as a tool for energy harvesting and supplying. Compared to most source-limited RFID tag, it can support more complex computation that will facilitate to enhance our trust solution. Thus, the sensing tag is a promising way for supporting trustworthy supply chain and logistics flows, especially for those food-related applications, in the future.