Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry

ANR VERSO 2009 “Widening Interoperability for Networking Global Supply Chains” (WINGS) (2009-2011)

Participants : Nathalie Mitton [ contact ] , Loïc Schmidt, David Simplot-Ryl.

As we move forward towards ambient intelligence environments where most devices are connected to seamless, ubiquitous networks, inter-enterprise interoperability becomes an essential condition. The next phase of the supply chain development will improve robustness and increase reach. Such a shift of focus from small localized activities to large cross-company and cross-country networks will require both more complete and more comprehensive data sets. This implies efficient data synchronization, guaranteed data availability and improved data security. The exciting opportunities come from the fact that this scenario will integrate complex networks composed of a huge amount of different types of objects - forming the so-called Internet of things or rather Intranet of Goods as it can be designed in a networked business-to-business world. This increase in scale for the network also demands the development of an architecture framework that will allow an open governance model. The WINGS project focuses on the large scale EPCGlobal network as being part of the Internet of Things and in which, as designed, a single ONS (Object Naming Service) root is in existence today. What's more, the operation of this root has been entrusted to an US-based company by EPCGlobal Inc. Given the importance of ONS systems in a near future, it is becoming urgent to develop alternative solutions to break the current centralized architecture and the monopoly of a single company. For ensuring the further interconnection and the interoperability of these roots, the project partners propose to design and evaluate a multi-root ONS system that will take into consideration security, stability, performance as well as interaction with DS (Discovery Services). The aim is to show that several ONS roots can work together and safely share the management and the governance of the network.

List of participants: GS1 France (Nicolas Pauvre), INRIA POPS, PMC (Marcelo Dias de Amorim), AFNIC (Mohsen Souissi), Orange Labs (Dominique Le Hello), GREYC (Jacques Madelaine). http://www.wings-project.fr/ .