Cornel Turcu

An RFID-Based System for Emergency Health Care Services

Although substantial progress was made in improving the sharing of patient medical information among healthcare providers, professionals still need to address the issue of efficient electronic medical records. Thus, real-time information presents a persistent challenge to the emergency response community. In emergency situations, particularly with unconscious, incoherent and unaccompanied patients, providing emergency physicians with a patient’s accurate medical history could be the difference between life and death. The RFID technology has penetrated the healthcare sector due to its increased functionality, low cost, high reliability and easy-to-use capabilities. As the present paper demonstrates, our major aim was to design an RFID-based system architecture and data model that would provide efficient means to perform essential information management for emergency care across hospital and country boundaries.

The Social Internet of Things and the RFID-based robots

Internet of Things allows the interconnection of smart objects, such as mobile robots, wireless sensors, etc., and of human beings, by using different communication protocols and by developing a dynamic multi-modal heterogeneous network. This paper proposes some considerations on cognitive robots based on radio frequency identification technology within Internet of Things, by adding a social dimension to human-robot and robot-robot interactions. Social networks can be used for storing and sharing links to resources of interest for the humanrobot and robot-robot interactions. A Stinger robot-based prototype was built to demonstrate the presented functionalities. The prototype shows that this model is not only flexible, but also practical.

RFID-based Information System for Patients and Medical Staff Identification and Tracking

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is having a major impact on the health care industry. By attaching radio frequency tags to different entities (people and objects), RFID technology can provide identification, tracking, location, security and other capabilities. The goal of this chapter is to show how RFID technology can be used to reduce medical mistakes, improve patient safety and enhance the quality of medical service in hospitals. After briefly introducing the eHealth domain and some of the healthcare issues, this chapter describes how the RFID technology can be used in healthcare. Thus the third section describes some hospital use cases that could benefit from RFID technology. Also it briefly presents some of the existing projects that successfully implement this emerging technology in healthcare. The next section shows how to use a medical staff and patients tracking application, called the RFIDHospitalTracker, to improve the quality of the hospital services. We have developed the RFIDHospitalTracker to support the high requirements for scalability, reliability and security. An overview of its distributed software architecture is given. Also, this section enumerates some open problems that still have to be solved before RFID technology will be fully embraced by the healthcare community. The last part presents some of the future developments proposed by our research team. The conclusion summarizes the main achievements of this chapter.

Diagnosis of complex systems using ant colony decision Petri nets

Failure diagnosis in large and complex systems is a critical task. A discrete event system (DES) approach to the problem of failure diagnosis is presented in this paper. A classic solution to solve DESs diagnosis is a stochastic Petri nets. Unfortunately, the solution of a stochastic Petri net is severely restricted by the size of its underlying Markov chain. On the other hand, it has been shown that foraging behavior of ant colonies can give rise to the shortest path, which will reduce the state explosion of stochastic Petri net. Therefore, a new model of stochastic Petri net, based on foraging behavior of real ant colonies is introduced in this paper. This model can contribute to the diagnosis, the performance analysis and design of supervisory control systems.

An RFID and OPC Technology Based Distributed System for Production Control and Monitoring

This paper deals with an implemented system that contains advanced RFID-based control gates and smart connections to an OPC server that acts as central dispatcher. It proposes a scenario focused on the usage of more different control gates together with an integrated solution based on the state of the art industrial technology.

An RFID-Based Anti-Counterfeiting Track and Trace Solution

As markets become more global and competition intensifies, firms are beginning to realize that competition is not exclusively a firm versus firm domain, but a supply chain against supply chain phenomenon (***a, 2008). Under these circumstances, an increasing strategic importance to any organization independent of size or of sector is to deliver information, goods and services in full, on time and error-free to customers. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology represents one of a number of possible solutions to enhance supply chain. RFID technology permits the unique identification of each container, pallet, case and item to be manufactured, shipped and sold, thus allowing an increased visibility throughout the supply chain. Also, an RFID anti-counterfeiting mechanism could be implemented. This chapter focuses on how RFID technology can be used to solve problems faced by supply chain, such as track and traceability, anti-counterfeiting. It proposes a track-andtrace anti-counterfeiting system using RFID technology. The submitted system (hereinafter referred to as ATPROD system) is aimed at relatively high-end consumer products, and it helps protect genuine products by maintaining the product pedigree and the supply chain integrity. Our system integrates mobile systems to extend corporate data outwards to mobile devices for viewing and querying. Also, users can use any mobile device endowed with an RFID reader for data collection. In this way, manual entry data has been eliminated. Moreover, users can read the tags wherever the items are placed, which enables a more flexible storage environment and an efficiency increase of supply chains and anticounterfeiting. We developed an RFID embedded system based on an eBox with an RFID reader attached. This system, named MICC (Interfacing, Command and Control Module), enables many applications to run at the same time as concurrent processes. Each entry or/ and exit gate of the warehouse in a supply chain could be managed by a MICC module. If there are multiple gates the installed MICC modules (from warehouse or company) could be linked together into a network. From a functional perspective, the MICC module must meet the following requirements: to read/ write data on RFID tags attached to items passing through a gate, to manage a large number of RFID tags passing through a gate at the same time, to provide data transmission via the network to a central server, to process local data and to provide the possibility of

Improvement of Supply Chain Performances Using RFID Technology

As markets become more global and competition intensifies, firms are beginning to realize that competition is not exclusively a firm versus firm domain, but a supply chain against supply chain phenomenon (***a, 2008). Under these circumstances, an increasing strategic importance to any organization independent of size or of sector, is to deliver information, goods and services in full, on time and error-free to customers. From demand forecasting, to the sourcing of raw materials, right through to manufacture and dispatchvisibility in the supply chain is becoming an important facet of any modern operation (Coltman et al., 2008). But at this moment, the interconnectivity between various links in the supply chain is incomplete and inaccurate, every link in the chain being an individualistic entity with different processes. This leads to poor product visibility and stock transparency across the supply chain. For companies looking at multiple markets, the lack of visibility in their supply chain can lead to tremendous loss of revenue. But even if information technology is used within a supply chain to share information on end-customer demand and inventory levels, there is still often a discrepancy between this information and the real physical flow of products. This discrepancy frequently derives from the missing real-time or near real-time data in concordance with the physical flow of goods. The result is inaccurate inventory information. Reasons why information system inventory records are inaccurate include external and internal theft, unsaleables (e.g. damaged, out-of-date, discontinued, promotional, or seasonal items that cannot be sold any longer), incorrect incoming and outgoing deliveries (Raman et al., 2001; Fleisch & Tellkamp, 2003), as well as misplaced items (Raman et al., 2001). Thus, even when inventory records are accurate, misplaced items mean that they were not out of stock, but rather misplaced in storage areas or in the wrong location within the store. The phenomenon of inventory inaccuracy is well-known. As Raman et al. (Raman et al., 2001) show in their case study, most retailers cannot precisely identify the number of units of a given item available at a store; thus for more than 65% of stock keeping units (SKUs) in retail stores, information on inventory in the inventory management system was inaccurate (i.e. the information system inventory differed from physical inventory). The difference was on average 35% of the target inventory. In a second case study, the authors found that a median of 3.4% of SKUs were not found on the sales floor although inventory was available O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w .in te ch w eb .o rg

High Complexity Control Gates with Advanced RFID Features for Production Process Monitoring

In nowadays manufacturing plants there is a certain degree in which the RFID technology has been adopted. This degree may vary from marking the components of a final product (for example a car) using RFID tags in order to verify if they are all in place at the end of the production line, to the production flow monitoring and finally to the supply chain management. The presented system contains advanced high complexity RFID-based control gates and smart connections to an OPC server that acts as central dispatcher. The system is able to satisfy a large number of customer requirements for process monitoring and control.

Internet Orchestra of Things: A Different Perspective on the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is defined as a global network that links together living and/or non-living entities, such as people, animals, software, physical objects or devices. These entities can interact with each other, gather, provide or transmit information to the IoT. Although the Internet of Things is a relatively new concept, various platforms are already available. Some of them are open platforms, enabling both the integration of people, systems, and objects from the physical and virtual world, and the visualization of data. For example, there are already some IoT platforms used, like Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure IoT Hub, Amazon Web Services IoT Platform, IBM Watson IoT Platform, Nimbits, Open.Sen.se, ThingWorx, and ThingSpeak. But what if things could not only “work” and “speak”, but also “sing”? We propose a game in which the things connected to IoT can play in real time different sounds, according to the values of some monitored parameters. These things can be grouped in the IoT platform to create a virtual orchestra and make music. Besides this game allowing the creation of great songs, it can be widely used to explain the new ideas behind the fast emerging areas of the Internet of Things. In addition to many technical challenges, it is also worth considering the effect the IoT concept will have on people, society, and economy as a whole.

A performance analysis of parallel eigensolvers for large dense symmetric matrices

The correct determination of eigenvalues of a matrix is extremely important in various computational sciences disciplines such as quantum physics, quantum chemistry statistics orengineering. Finding eigenvalues corresponds to diagonalizing a matrix, a joint operation in various applications such as solving algebraic equations, stability theory, and the analysis of small oscillations in a vibrating system etc. Eigensolvers prove to be useful in building simulators of various processes. However, in simulation, for obtaining results with a high accuracy it is necessary to model a huge number of events that involve large-scale computational resources and significant amounts of time. In this case, the parallelization of simulation represents a demand and the solution employs high performance parallel processing algorithms. The goals of this paper are to develop a ScaLAPACK-based experimental environment and to analyze the performance of this parallel solution to compute the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a matrix considering the architecture features of IBM Roadrunner cluster and HPCx systems. The results of performance comparison study of two parallel eigensolvers provided by ScaLAPACK library demonstrate a strong scaling capability of IBM Roadrunner cluster for problems which imply large dense algebra operations in contrast with those large parallel machines such as HPCx.