STORE VIEW: pervasive RFID & indoor navigation based retail inventory management

Abstract

Today's retail consumers' general behavior consists of doing the research for products preferably online while purchasing them offline. Users would like to access stores' inventories before going to the shop. This paper first identifies the challenges that need to be addressed to navigate within a store and its inventory anytime and anywhere without being physically there. Then, it analyzes the existing approaches for inventory management based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). And finally, it proposes a solution based on robots. We believe that this proposal is an important contribution to fill the gap between online and offline worlds in the context of retail.