Automated assets management based on RFID-triggered alarm messages

Abstract

Asset management has long been considered as an important issue in enterprise organizations. However, automated asset management has still been inadequately supported by existing information systems. It is very common in these systems that information about location, status, and usage is often inaccurate or incomplete and inaccurate or incomplete may cause delays in operations, inefficient use of inventory of costly assets, and may even lead to asset damage or lost. With the maturity of the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, automated management of assets (particularly for mobile ones) in an enterprise using RFID becomes practical. According to our study and analysis, the RFID application in asset management field has a huge and potential market. RFID technology can realize the real intelligence of asset management, improve the efficiency of asset valuation, strengthen the real-time dynamic management of devices, and increase the benefits of asset management in many ways. In this thesis, we develop a RFID-based Asset Management System (RAMS), enabled by a Web-based Geographical Information System (WebGIS) and Short Message System (SMS) technologies. RFID is used to automate the entire life-cycle process for management of assets, including their acquisition, transfer, auditing, maintenance, and retirement. WebGIS is used to facilitate dynamic and visual representation of the spatial information of the asset distribution on an electronic map. SMS is used for automated transferring of asset movement information in a distributed environment. Especially, we develop a Maximum Position First speed-up algorithm (MPF) for SMS scheduling to ensure timely sending of the alarm SMSs that have high priorities. We also evaluated the efficiency and feasibility of the RAMS system. Our preliminary result shows that our system can improve the availability of assets and reduce the asset management cost dramatically, with good user experience.