Integrating RFID in MAS through “Sleeping” Agents: a Case Study

and Case Studies 360 RFID is a generic technology concept that refers to the use of radio waves to identify objects.RFID is a non-contact interrogation method for identification of objects.An RFID system essentially consists of three parts: 1. RFID tag itself that is a device of various shapes (the shape varies according to the application in which the tag will be used) composed of memory unit and an antenna that is used to communicate with the remote reader device.The dimension of this memory is continuously increasing and today there are some RFID tags with various kilobyte of memory.2. the RFID transponder is a device supplying and communicating with the tag by means of a radio wave.There are various types of RFID reader varying in resolution, reading distance, etc. 3. a backend information management system that is the system that use the data stored in each RFID to accomplish the various tasks (supply chain management, factory automation, etc.).In this work the authors propose to use the high memory capacity RFID for introducing the new concept of "sleeping agent".In order to show the suitability of this concept in real world applications, the authors propose as case study a model of clinical risk management system based on a MAS employing sleeping agents.The remaining part of this work is organized as follows: in section II there is a brief related works overview, in section III the RFID technology is introduced while in section IV the sleeping agent is presented.The analyzed case study is described in section V while the proposed MAS is presented in VI.Finally conclusions and remarks are proposed in section VII.