Inventory Control Basics 259
Consider each technology acting as an intelligent agent. So, if a customer desires to know the
history of a product, the UPC transfers information to a bar code that transfers information to an
passive RFID tag, which transfers information to a active RFID tag that passes information to a
global positioning system. This daisy chain type of interlinking provides an open-loop concept that
provides all potential players into the supply chain effective visibility. This nesting of auto-id
technologies may be an intermediate step to protability for most intermediate RFID implementations.
We next consider a framework that describes this type of technologies.