Adam Sills recently published Application Level Events (ALE) In A Nutshell which provides a good technical overview of ALE and how it manifests within iMotion. For those unfamiliar with ALE, it is a specification that was the first ratified software interface standard from EPCglobal. It defines provisions for the collection, filtering, counting, grouping and reporting of EPC and, in GlobeRanger’s implementation of ALE, non-EPC data. Edge processes use ALE to dictate where to obtain data, establish the conditions under which data aggregation starts and stops, specify data filtering and formatting rules and pick a communication strategy to obtain reports. The primary benefits of ALE:
- It enables the true separation of business logic from physical deployments
- It allows deployment and application engineers to focus on their areas of expertise. iMotion, for example, allows deployment engineers to configure, monitor and manage the physical infrastructure through the EMC and EDM and enables application engineers to create, configure and monitor edge processes through the Event Workflow Editor and EPM.
- Device and application infrastructure can scale independently. iMotion’s flexible architecture allows you to scale EDMs separately from EPMs to adjust to system loads.
- Allows edge processes to be constructed once and subsequently deployed into many physical environments. This results in highly leverageable software assets that can be used across solution and product engagements.
- Enables interoperability at the edge