The 13 members of the Cluster of European RFID Projects - CERP were invited by the European Commission to provide a paper on RFID research needs for RFID which shall serve as an input to the 2nd call in the 7th Research Framework Programme. At their meeting in Berlin the CERP partners decided that a powerful vision on RFID must be based on a strong focus on applications. According to the RFID Reference Model

(download: www.rfid-in-action.eu/public/rfid-reference-model) developed within the EU-funded CE RFID project the CERP experts will concentrate on four RFID application fields which endorse great benefits for society and economics: Beside the well-established application areas logistics and manufacturing, CERP will also deal with product safety, i.e. food chain or anti- counterfeited pharmaceuticals. Finally, the experts evaluated the combination of RFID with smart card and mobile devices in application areas such as access control, payment and loyalty as most promising. At their next meeting on August 30-31 in Espoo, Finland the CERP partners will discuss the research tasks that are induced by the four application fields.

The paper will be presented at the European conference "On RFID: The next step towards the Internet of Things" in November in Lisbon. The preliminary CERP working paper "RFID Research Needs" is available online: www.rfid-in-action.eu/cerp.