A Collaborative Architecture for Supply Chain Transparency Based on EPCIS Standard and MongoDB

Transparency is a fundamental requirement for granting the safety and quality of products along the whole supply chain. To reach such objective, a great collaboration along the actors of the supply chain is required. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and other pervasive computing technologies are able to generate event data to keep track of how physical entities pass through different parties of the supply chain processes. Recently, the Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) standard was introduced to enable the sharing of such events across supply chains. Works presented in literature are mainly focused on enabling technologies, with less emphasis on assessing how the available information can be used for a control at a higher level. In this paper, we present a collaborative architecture allowing the traceability of information about products throughout the entire supply chain by exploiting both the EPCIS standard and a NoSQL database. An application showing the potentiality of the proposed system in a case study is also reported.