Abstract
Currently, food quality has become a major concern for the food industry. To efficiently detect food quality problems during the production process, food enterprises must build quality monitoring systems. However, in a traditional quality monitoring system, data tampering and centralized storage have become barriers to reliability. In addition, due to lack of sufficient automation, traditional quality monitoring approaches are usually inefficient. Fortunately, blockchain is a promising technology that is tamper-proof and decentralized. Moreover, smart contracts, which are executable codes on the blockchain platform, are able to conduct transactions between mutually untrusted parties and are self-executing and self-verifying. By combining smart contracts and quality evaluation models, this paper presents an intelligent quality monitoring system for fruit juice production. This system has the characteristics of high automation and high reliability. In this system, response surface models are established based on preproduction data, and the optimal production condition for each stage is identified. During the actual production process, smart contracts are executed to record production data on a blockchain. These data serve as the inputs for evaluation models. Based on the evaluation outcome, smart contracts will decide whether the production process can be resumed or not. To evaluate the feasibility of the presented system, a prototype version of the quality monitoring system for flat peach juice production is implemented based on the Ethereum platform and executed in the Remix IDE.
Highlights
Due to the complexity of the relevant links involved in the food production process, pollution or deterioration in any link may directly influence the food quality
In this paper, combining the advantages of blockchain, smart contracts and evaluation models, we propose an intelligent and reliable food quality monitoring system to automatically monitor and evaluate the quality of fruit juice samples generated in each production stage
By utilizing the off-chain models with on-chain data in combination, our system makes use of the traceability of blockchain and auto-execution of smart contracts to achieve reliable and efficient quality monitoring inside a food manufacturer, which is greatly different from existing work applying blockchain or smart contracts on food quality assurance, including the product quality management system recording product registration and transfer histories in [26], the blockchain scheme for information sharing in [22], the agri-food supply chain system based on RFID and blockchain in [23], the blockchain-based credit evaluation system in [24], the food quality traceability system based on the blockchain and the EPC information services in [25]
Summary
Due to the complexity of the relevant links involved in the food production process, pollution or deterioration in any link may directly influence the food quality. The blockchain and smart contract technologies discussed above mainly focus on traceability for effectiveness supervision and information retrieval, while quality evaluation and monitoring inside a food manufacturer have not yet been considered. We propose a monitoring framework that combines smart contracts and evaluation models for the automatic evaluation of the quality of fruit juice samples generated in each production stage. These three modules are respectively carried out prior to the production process and during and after each production stage. The conclusions of this study are presented, and future research directions are discussed
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