Standards and regulations
Standards groups
The EPCglobal Standards Development Process is a user driven standards process for the development of technical standards. Although many elements will be very familiar, this standards organisation and process is a necessary hybrid and will not look exactly like any other standards organisation.
Participation in the standards development groups is open to all EPCglobal members who have signed the IP policy and opt-in agreements. The standards development process consists of three phases.
- Industry Discussions Groups - are preliminary engagement groups where user from different industry discuss about the need to establish IAG for their requirement to be standardised. It is a unique opportunity for the industry players to participate when the standards are being developed. Some of the discussions groups established by EPCglobal includes:
- - Defence
- - Aerospace
- - Consumer Electronics
- - Chemical
- - Automotive
- Industry Action group (IAG's) - This is where the business requirements are gathered from the end user community. IAG's are comprised of representatives from companies that currently use or plan to utilise EPCglobal Network technology. Their aim is to establish business requirements and use cases across multiple industries to facilitate supply chain efficiency. There are currently number of active IAG's:
- - Retail Supply Chain (RSC-IAG)
- - Healthcare and Life Sciences (HLS-IAG)
- - Transportation and Logistics (TLS-IAG)
- Technical Action Groups - The technical action groups take the business requirements received from the user community and create technical specifications to meet those requirements. The two main technical action groups are:
- 1. The Hardware Action Group (HAG):
develops specifications for key hardware components of the EPCglobal Network, including readers and tags. - 2. The Software Action Group (SAG):
defines the software functionality and interface standards for the EPCglobal Network and how these elements interact with distributed enterprise systems.
