Supporting Interval Time Complex Events Processing in an RFID System

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a prevalent wireless identification technology that collects identity information from RFID tags to RFID readers. Complex events processing is an important technique in RFID systems to define the systems status as events and then detect them automatically. Typically the events specifies various of relations of components of a system, where temporal relation is one of such important relations. Existing complex event processing systems specify temporal relations based on the model that events happen instantly. In many applications it is proper to model an event’s occurrence in a time interval, which is called an interval time event. In this paper, we propose a complex event processing approach that can directly specify interval time events and their temporal relations for an RFID system. Thirteen basic temporal relations and several more complex relations are systematically defined for such events. We also propose an approach to build the automaton for the specified events, which can be executed for detecting the events. The evaluation results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing approaches.