Industry Standards

RFID holds great promise for dramatic improvements to value chain performance across the entire economy. OAT has a deep heritage stretching back to the very beginnings of standards-based approaches to RFID:

• Sanjay Sarma, OAT’s Chief Scientist and also an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, co-founded the Auto-ID Center in 1999 to build the standards foundation for successful value chain applications of RFID.
• The Auto-ID Center was a tremendously successful partnership of over 100 global companies and five research institutions including MIT that defined the specifications for RFID technology and demonstrated numerous successful applications on a large scale.
• As a result, the Auto-ID Center led to the creation of EPCglobal, a subsidiary of GS1, to carry the effort forward.

OAT is committed to delivering market leading standards-based, RFID solutions. OAT is putting this commitment into practice today in many ways, including:

• Professor Sanjay Sarma, OAT’s Chief Scientist, serves (as one of 14 members) on the Board of Governors of EPCglobal – a joint venture between EAN International and the Uniform Council Code (UCC) organizations that for more than 30 years have been committed to standards-based global supply chain solutions.
• OAT has representation in a number of standards activities within EPCglobal, including:

  
  - Software Action Group (SAG) which is forming the standard for RFID software within EPCglobal
  
  - Business Action Group (BAG) which is forming the standard for inter-company sharing of RFID information within EPCglobal
  
  - Hardware Action Group (HAG) which is defining the interfaces between hardware components (primarily RFID tags and readers) within EPCglobal
  
  - Architecture Review Committee (ARC), which is responsible for the creation, documentation, and maintenance of EPCglobal architecture

• OAT is fully leveraging non RFID-specific standards (J2EE, XML, SNMP, etc.) in the development of its solutions.