Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been identified as one of the most important technologies for the 21st century. According to current market projections, more than half a billion nodes will have been shipped for wireless sensor applications by 2010. On the other hand, the evolving “Internet of Things”, considered as the global network infrastructure, linking physical and virtual objects through the exploitation of data capture and communication capabilities, raises even more the already high hopes of WSN. The deployment of WSN in “smart factories” and logistics applications is already a fact and has attracted the interest of the research community and the electronics development giants worldwide. Before their wide exploitation however, WSNs have to solve some significant problems, including simple installation, simple adaptation, simple integration, simple maintenance and simple utilisation.

The main goal of the SIMPLE project is to research and deliver an intelligent, self-organizing embedded middleware platform, with particular emphasis on the integration of manufacturing and logistics. SIMPLE will address the issue of supporting the self-organization and cooperation of wireless sensors and smart (RFID) tags for federated, open and trusted deployment environments in the manufacturing and logistics application domains.

The primary idea is to enable the dynamic interworking of ultra heterogeneous sensors and tags, which should autonomously organize in hierarchies, thus leveraging the development of a new class of secure, scalable, cost-effective, and easy-to-deploy “smart factory” and logistics applications. The SIMPLE outcomes aim at compensating the current lack of open-source and commercial solutions capable of monitoring the state of shipments at different grouping levels(e.g., at the crate and case levels) and, more generally, of tracing goods along the whole supply chain, for instance by storing and reporting relevant environmental conditions to determine the health of goods after the production/shipment processes.

SIMPLE will develop a novel and complete sensor and RFID based embedded middleware platform for manufacturing and logistics applications  and validate the platform in scenarios dealing with holistic lifecycle management for manufacturing, distribution, recycling and disposal of goods.