Abstract
Zambia’s agricultural sector through Food Reserve Agency (FRA) while still underdeveloped faces many challenges that range from marketing, spoilage, infestations, and theft at site, spillage and storage among others. The methods used by FRA in their business processes are largely manual as there are no systems in place. In order to help curb these problems, this paper proposed and developed novel methods that can be used to sense real-time warehouse intrusion and grain tracking within the FRA circulation. The IoT based prototype model made use of the APC220 transceiver, GSM, GPRS, RFID, PIR and cloud storage. To curb theft of grain at storage points, the system used motion sensing through the use of PIR sensors, wireless radio communication module and the GSM/GPRS technologies such that when anyone comes in the range of PIR sensor, then the sensor will send a logic signal to the microcontroller. Lastly, the RFID combined with GSM and Arduino microcontroller responsible for grain tracking. From the results obtained in the experiment conducted it is believed that once this technology is adopted, theft will be reduced and grain management in the FRA satellite Depots dotted around the country will improve.
Highlights
Food is a fundamental human need and as such food security is cardinal in any country [1]
This was the first ever official audit report on food reserve agency grain management, according to the report Food Reserve Agency (FRA) experienced maize shortages of 115, 516 × 50kg bags valued at ZMK4, 274, 092, 000 at various depots
From the proof of concept experiment carried out on the proposed Internet of Things (IoT) prototype based warehouse intrusion detection (e-perimeter) and grain tracking model, it has been observed that once these methods are adopted by the food reserve agency, food security will greatly improve as the sole aim of these methods are to reduce the chances of theft at FRA, and www.ijacsa.thesai.org the various ways in which these methods will bring about improvement in food security are that national resources will be preserved i.e. the money invested in buying of grain will be reduced as security mechanisms would be in place
Summary
Food is a fundamental human need and as such food security is cardinal in any country [1]. It has been noted that FRA faces challenges in efficient management of inventory [1], this is according to the auditor general’s report that was carried out between 2006 and 2009 to review the performance of FRA [5] This was the first ever official audit report on food reserve agency grain management, according to the report FRA experienced maize shortages of 115, 516 × 50kg bags valued at ZMK4, 274, 092, 000 (old currency) at various depots. These losses were attributed to theft and grain spoilage at the warehouse depots [5].Most of the challenges reported were as a result of poor monitoring and a poor inventory management approach which is largely manual and paper based [1]. The baseline studies report that FRA as reported in the auditor general’s findings still had challenges of manual report generation, lack of connectivity to remote warehouses [6], failure to track stock on demand [6], theft [1] and spoilage of stock due to lack of environmental monitoring [6] [1]. [7] Notes that efforts to improve upon food security subsequently reducing hunger especially in the world’s poorest countries should give priority to the issue of crop losses
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