A Formal Model for Enabling RFID in Pharmaceutical Supply Chains

The use of RFID technology for anti-counterfeiting involves complex event processing, which exceeds the current state of the art of product tracking and tracing implementations. The use of RFID requires storing good related events for anti-counterfeiting in a distributed way by each handling party individually. We define a formal approach for modeling of data entities, events, and operations that correlate to handling of pharmaceutical goods. This supports the operation of a unified service provider for anti-counterfeiting that matches virtual product history and event data from distributed repositories of involved supply chain roles. Our contribution includes a quantitative analysis of the expected data amount and related costs for operating this service provider by applying our formal approach to a concrete pharmaceutical supply chain.