A big data approach for logistics trajectory discovery from RFID-enabled production data

Radio frequency identification (RFID) has been widely used in supporting the logistics management on manufacturing shopfloors where production resources attached with RFID facilities are converted into smart manufacturing objects (SMOs) which are able to sense, interact and reason to create a ubiquitous environment. Within such environment, enormous data could be collected and used for supporting further decision-makings such as logistics planning and scheduling. This paper proposes a holistic Big Data approach to excavate frequent trajectory from massive RFID-enabled shopfloor logistics data with several innovations highlighted. Firstly, RFID-Cuboids are creatively introduced to establish a data warehouse so that the RFID-enabled logistics data could be highly integrated in terms of tuples, logic, and operations. Secondly, a Map Table is used for linking various cuboids so that information granularity could be enhanced and dataset volume could be reduced. Thirdly, spatio-temporal sequential logistics trajectory is defined and excavated so that the logistics operators and machines could be evaluated quantitatively. Finally, key findings from the experimental results and insights from the observations are summarized as managerial implications, which are able to guide end-users to carry out associated decisions. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.