The Development of a Multi-Agent Based Middleware for RFID Asset Management System Using the PASSI Methodology

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology enables information to be remotely stored and retrieved by means of electromagnetic radiation. Compared to other automatic identification technologies, RFID provides an efficient, flexible and inexpensive way of identifying and tracking objects. Asset management is one of the potential applications for RFID technology. Asset management using RFID reduces the workload on asset audit administrators while eliminating the error prone manual audit processes. Successful implementation of RFID asset management system requires an intelligent use of the data harvested from the RFID system. This work describes the development of a multi-agent based middleware solution for processing and managing the data produced by RFID system for asset management applications. The middleware is developed using the agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) methodology PASSI (Process for Agent Societies Specification and Implementation).