A Framework for Mining RFID Data From Schedule-Based Systems

A schedule-based system is a system that operates on or contains within a schedule of events and breaks at particular time intervals. Entities within the system show presence or absence in these events by entering or exiting the locations of the events. Given radio frequency identification (RFID) data from a schedule-based system, what can we learn about the system (the events and entities) through data mining? Which data mining methods can be applied so that one can obtain rich actionable insights regarding the system and the domain? The research goal of this paper is to answer these posed research questions, through the development of a framework that systematically produces actionable insights for a given schedule-based system. We show that through integrating appropriate data mining methodologies as a unified framework, one can obtain many insights from even a very simple RFID dataset, which contains only very few fields. The developed framework is general, and is applicable to any schedule-based system, as long as it operates under certain basic assumptions. The types of insights are also general, and are formulated in this paper in the most abstract way. The applicability of the developed framework is illustrated through a case study, where real world data from a schedule-based system is analyzed using the introduced framework. Insights obtained include the profiling of entities and events, the interactions between entity and events, and the relations between events.