Traceability Technology Research Articles

Cyber physical system-enabled synchronization mechanism for pick-and-sort ecommerce order fulfilment

This research has aimed itself at capitalizing the benefits of CPS-enabled visibility and traceability technology for adaptive synchronization of pick-and-sort ecommerce order fulfilment. With assistance of IoT systems, the involved men, materials, and machines are turned into smart objects, deploying in the real-time environment. According to the real-time data collected from working stages, an adaptive synchronization mechanism with associated HGA-VNS algorithm is proposed to balance the picking simultaneity and sorting punctuality. Picking simultaneity attempts to make the items of a pick wave to be picked by several pickers in their particular working zone simultaneously and finished in a same time window, so that the subsequent sorting process could be started as early as possible. Sortation punctuality aims to ensure that the due date of an individual order is satisfied. The presented method is verified and evaluated via a case study. Trade-off analysis and sensitivity analysis are also examined with several key findings, considering varied order fulfilment scenarios such as slack / busy season, zoning effects, and item assignment policy.

Microecology and geoherbalism of traditional Chinese medicine

Microecology was directly or indirectly involved in the growth and development, metabolism process, and component accumulation of traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) in various ways, which affected the formation and changes of the geoherbalism of TCM. It was one of the main tasks of traditional Chinese medical microecology(TCMM) to reveal the relationship among microecological structure and its change rule and the quality effect of TCM. The heterogeneity of soil environment caused by geographical and climatic factors, as well as the discreteness limitation caused by isolation factors such as distance and host selection, were the main causes of the differentiation of microecological geography of TCM. The microecology of TCM had important influences and contributions on the distinctive origin and quality of Dao-di herbs, which was mainly reflected in the formation of excellent germplasm(including disease and insect resistance, drought resistance, salt resistance, cold resistance, etc.), the increase of yield, the formation of medicinal parts, the metabolism and accumulation of effective components, the time limit of harvesting, and the toxicity, increasing efficiency or reducing toxicity of TCM in the processing, the changes of product efficiency after introduction, and the authenticity of fungus medicine. With the vigorous development of metabonomics and modern information technology, the following aspects would become the future research trends, including the microecologically mediated biogenic pathway of chemical components, the metabolic synthesis reactor of TCM based on the microecological quantitative effect relationship, the cultivation of genuine Chinese medicine based on reconstruction of microecological structure, the origin identification barcode traceability technology, and the toxicity reduction and efficiency enhancement technology of TCM based on the microecological.

Development of Quality and Safety Traceability of Agricultural Products Based on Internet Plus

Ensuring the quality and safety of agricultural products is one of the basic requirements of building a moderately prosperous society and it is related to the development of agriculture and the countryside as well as people’s health and safety. The Internet Plus initiative has accelerated the building of quality and safety standards and traceability systems for agricultural products. Overall, the quality and safety risks of agricultural products have been effectively controlled. However, there remain many problems, such as ambiguity of power and duties of government oversight, severe segmentation of different regions, poor uniformity in traceability standards, lack of width, depth, and accuracy of traceability information, weak commercial operation capacity, and insufficient sustainability of traceability systems. This study reviews the progress in agricultural product quality and safety with respect to supervision system, laws and regulations, standards system construction, and traceability technology/system development in China, then analyzes the main problems, and finally proposes potential solutions to achieve the development objectives for 2025 and 2035. We propose promoting the standardization of information traceability, improving the national traceability system, deepening risk monitoring and warning, widening the practical fields and service products, focusing on research of traceability technology, and paying attention to professional training. By this means, we hope that China can realize the long-term goals of building a sustainable traceability system with positive cycle and modernizing the national management system of agricultural product quality and safety in 2035.

Food traceability technologies and foodborne outbreak occurrences

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify the relationship between the frequency of publication on food supply chain (FSC) traceability and the occurrence of foodborne diseases outbreaks.Design/methodology/approachA systematic review of the literature was carried out to locate the main articles published in the literature, followed by a content analysis in order to list the main food traceability technologies and their evolutions. Finally, a Spearman’s ρ correlation analysis between the frequency of publications on FSC traceability and the annual occurrence of foodborne outbreaks in the five largest food exporting countries in the world was performed.FindingsIn these analyses, the tools of radiofrequency, deoxyribonucleic acid, wireless sensor network, hazard analysis and critical control points and Internet of Things are the most researched technologies, and they are relevant in the evolution of traceability in the FSC. With correlation coefficients above 0.700 at 0.01 significance levels, this evolution of food traceability technologies has been one of the factors reducing the number of food outbreaks in the USA and Germany, countries with greater development of the health system and food control.Originality/valueThis paper provides an evaluation of the food traceability technologies and the effects of their evolutions in the occurrence of food outbreaks. This may help in the proposal of public policies related to food and outbreak control.

Traceability System of Agricultural Product Based on Block-chain and Application in Tea Quality Safety Management

In recent years, with the increase of consumers’ attention to the quality of agricultural products, reliable and reliable traceability technology of agricultural products has been paid more attention. This paper proposed a block-chain traceability system based on smart agriculture with the integration of wireless sensor network. The system has realized the agricultural product traceability system based on Ethereum. After farmers access to the system, data acquisition front-end data storage to block-chain system, the use of block-chain itself has the characteristics of decentralization, tamper-resistant, security encryption, combined with the backend database management and traceability QR code to provide consumers with safe, reliable and real farm products traceability information. Building a holographic database of the tea whole industry chain from farmland to table, adopting the food risk assessment and safety traceability technology based on the hazard factor to design the multi-role, multi-link and multi-factor intelligent management system to realize the efficient control of food quality and safety.

Application of Intelligent Traceability Management System in Agriculture—Take Aodong Fruit and Vegetable Planting Cooperative as an Example

At present, strengthening the construction of agricultural product quality and safety traceability system and vigorously developing digital and intelligent agriculture have become the focus of future agricultural development. This project concentrates on the development of Golden Pear planting and processing industry chain in Aodong Village, Shigezhuang Town, Wuqing district, Tianjin. It combines Internet of Things, QR code traceability technology with cloud big data to develop an intelligent management system for Yongbei Golden Pear industry chain. The intelligent platform management makes fine traceability management from production to consumption possible, so as to further enhance the characteristic brand of cooperative agricultural products, create cooperative agricultural products sales channels and new image, and improve quality and efficiency of agriculture.

Food traceability: a term map analysis basic review

The aim of this work is to realize a term map analysis on technological advancements, in the year and in the world, of scientific researches of food traceability. Quality protection needs efficient instruments to discriminate Protected Denomination of Origin and Protected Geographical Indication varieties in field and to trace them along the agri-food chain. This study attempts to analyze global scientific of food traceability researches (between 1999 and 2018). In this period, 2534 scientific publications by Scopus database were found. Publication trends, research topics and their geographical distribution were analyzed by science mapping (VOSviewer software). Term map evidenced four main groups: red cluster with terms about food product and analytical methods for the characterization of food; green cluster including terms related with consumer (e.g., “food safety” and “food packaging”); blue cluster associating terms with the technology for traceability and yellow cluster with identification of food by genetic marker. It is possible to observe many links (i.e., co-occurrence between terms) in the green and blue clusters and among them. The yellow cluster could be considered as a subcategory of red one. In addition, green cluster refers to consumer and food safety. Yellow and red clusters contain analytical methods to identify food product, while blue cluster refers to advancements technological transferring information about the product to the consumer. These clusters do not present many linkages, and the consumer is in-between these. Finally, this study contributes to a better knowing of food traceability, and to an enhanced scientific research of technological advancements in supply chain.

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES OF TRANSPORTATION AND LOGISTICS SYSTEMS VISIBILITY

The article discusses the introduction of digital traceability technologies in transport and logistics systems, examines the legal framework for digital labeling and traceability of goods, substantiates the platform management concept of transport and logistics systems. According to this concept, the focal point of the transport chain is not the logistics operator, but an integrated digital platform management of transport and cargo flows, uniting all participants and providing a high degree of s transparency and traceability through the supply chain, evaluated the efficiency of the transport and logistics systems based on extensive use of modern digital information and communication technologies, with which it is possible to control orders to carry out the planning, organization, monitoring and control throughout the delivery procedure of goods

Differential Game Analysis of Optimal Strategies and Cooperation in Omni-Channel Organic Agricultural Supply Chain

This paper aims to investigate the optimal strategies for both centralized and decentralized modes in a two-echelon omni-channel organic agricultural supply chain (OASC) which consists of one farmer cooperative and one online retailer. Furthermore, the contracts of cooperation between the members in OASC are discussed. Based on both theory differential game and bi-level programming, we utilize the Nerlove–Arrow model and Stackelberg model to examine five cases of decision modes for both agents in the OASC. Then, we achieve the optimal strategies where the specified sets of organic growing effort, organic traceability technology effort, propaganda input, and service input can guarantee the maximization of the related profits. As a result, we could obtain the values of the corresponding optimal profits. For the centralized decision mode, the farmer cooperative and the online retailer make decisions with the goal of maximizing the overall profits of the OASC. Meanwhile, for the decentralized decision mode with four different cases, each member will independently make a decision with the goal of maximizing his own profit respectively. In detail, as for the fully decentralized decision mode, no contracts exist in OASC; regarding the decentralized decision mode with an information traceability cost sharing contract, two members pay the information traceability cost together; and for the decentralized decision mode with a revenue sharing contract, two members share the revenue together; as to the decentralized decision mode with a comprehensive contract, there are two cooperative ways that information traceability cost sharing and revenue sharing can be achieved. In addition, we also considered factors such as the consumer preferences of organic products and the cross influence between channels in models. Finally, through sensitivity analysis and comparison of optimal strategies and profits, we found that: (1) high consumer preferences of organic products and high cross influence between channels are profitable; and (2) the choice of contract is influenced by the relative size of the offline marginal income ratio and the online marginal income ratio.

Design and Key Technology Research on Veterinary Drug Quality and Safety Traceability System

Starting from the status quo of veterinary product traceability, this paper analyses the necessity of establishing the Veterinary Drug Quality and Safety Traceability System (the System), and expounds that the veterinary drug quality and safety traceability technology includes food safety traceability technology based on veterinary drug big data and key point information monitoring technology in the veterinary drug circulation. Then, according to “one code for one thing” standard of agricultural products, based on the framework of veterinary drug management system based on cloud platform, the veterinary drug quality and safety traceability system is constructed by integrating the cloud service resources such as infrastructure, data service and platform service provided by cloud platform of veterinary drug management information service. The opportunities and challenges facing the construction of veterinary drug quality and safety traceability system are also discussed in a bid to provide reference for the construction of veterinary drug quality and safety traceability system.

A Blockchain Implementation Prototype for the Electronic Open Source Traceability of Wood along the Whole Supply Chain.

This is the first work to introduce the use of blockchain technology for the electronic traceability of wood from standing tree to final user. Infotracing integrates the information related to the product quality with those related to the traceability [physical and digital documents (Radio Frequency IDentification—RFID—architecture)] within an online information system whose steps (transactions) can be made safe to evidence of alteration through the blockchain. This is a decentralized and distributed ledger that keeps records of digital transactions in such a way that makes them accessible and visible to multiple participants in a network while keeping them secure without the need of a centralized certification organism. This work implements a blockchain architecture within the wood chain electronic traceability. The infotracing system is based on RFID sensors and open source technology. The entire forest wood supply chain was simulated from standing trees to the final product passing through tree cutting and sawmill process. Different kinds of Internet of Things (IoT) open source devices and tags were used, and a specific app aiming the forest operations was engineered to collect and store in a centralized database information (e.g., species, date, position, dendrometric and commercial information).

Requirements traceability technologies and technology transfer decision support: A systematic review

Requirements traceability (RT) is a core activity in Requirements Engineering. Various types of RT technologies have been extensively studied for decades. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review from 114 papers between 2006 and 2016 on RT techniques. We summarized 10 major challenges in current RT activities, and categorized existing RT techniques into 6 groups and 25 sub-groups. Moreover, we built mapping relations between these challenges and techniques, and identified 7 potential future research directions. Based on 83 empirical studies, the evaluations for technology transfer are conducted. The main conclusions are: (1) The “trustworthy” and “automated” challenges are the most widely investigated ones, while “scalable”, “coordinated”, “dynamic” and “lightweight” challenges receive much less attention; (2) “Trace link generation”, especially information retrieval-based (IR-based) methods, are the most studied techniques; (3) IR-based methods have the most potential to be adopted by industry, as they have been validated from multiple viewpoints; (4) Seven promising future research directions are identified, which include developing scalable, dynamic and lightweight tracing techniques, introducing new approaches in other disciplines to meet the RT challenges, improving the express ability of trace links, promoting the industry adoption of RT technologies and developing new techniques to support developers’ coordination.

Development and evaluation of an intelligent traceability system for waterless live fish transportation

Chinese consumers prefer to purchase fish that have only recently been killed. The supplying of live fish is routinely delivered by water. However, the traditional transportation of live fish with water results in small volume of transportation and may cost prohibitive. Therefore, cold anesthetized waterless live fish transport is considered an alternative and promising strategy, since this is likely to demand less energy with large freight volume. This paper aims to develop an intelligent traceability platform based on HACCP system that integrates wireless monitoring and quality control models to improve the quality control and safety transparency in waterless fish transportation. In this research Chinese sturgeon is taken as experiment subjects for long-distance transportation. Oxygen change model is established as a life-sustained key factor by hybrid prediction method can optimize fish survivability. Survival prediction model is also designed for improvement of live delivery quality with minimum stress accumulation under precise temperature condition. For tracing function evaluation, the QR Code combined with existing EPC traceability technology enables users to expediently query and quickly trace the safety transport information from aquaculture to markets. To demonstrate the automatic monitoring and intelligent traceable management in this platform, sturgeon delivery experiments have been evaluated and analyzed. The results illustrate this system can reduce the potential risks, implement quality control with high survival results, and improve the live fish transport volume at low-costly. In brief, application of this smart platform will provide an effective, suitable technical reference for aquatic enterprises to follow, and help them to adjust the waterless transport techniques for the other types of aquatic products.

Selection of Traceable Technology in Food Supply Chain

Traceability is an essential tool to provide the product information throughout the Food Supply Chain (FSC), this help protecting the consumer welfare and in developing global competencies. Several technologies are available to implement the traceability system in FSC; these are barcoding, QR code, edible label, DNA- barcoding and paper-based systems. In this paper, we have tried to identify the significant factors towards the selection of the traceable technology within FSC through the literature review and supported by the expert opinion. These factor and sub-factors are prioritised using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The findings of this work suggest that product-related factors have the highest weight, and needs attention while selecting the traceable technology in FSC. This work may assist the practitioners in the selection of traceable technology for their FSC in an efficient manner.

Towards a decision support framework for technologies used in cold supply chain traceability

In recent years, a need for product traceability in the cold supply chain has emerged. The purpose of this study was to identify and map out different kinds of identification technologies and techniques used for cold supply chain traceability. This was done by looking into what traceability solutions are available right now through literature review. The results from this review were then further analyzed to obtain a basis for the current state of knowledge, technical solutions and to identify possible traceability structures in the cold chain. A Decision Support Framework (DSF) was constructed for choosing a suitable technical solution. It consists of a table listing different functions and attributes of technologies and a decision-tree. The DSF created from this work will help the user to identify what kind of traceability technology and structure best suits his products. This is important, as it can often be difficult for the user to decide which technology is most beneficial for his company. That is why this decision support framework will enable him to decide what is technologically feasible, practical, economical, can sustain reputation, quality and safety of the products.

Research and Construction of DC Energy Measurement Traceability Technology

With the implementation of energy saving and emission reduction policies, DC energy metering has been widely used in many fields. In view of the lack of a DC energy measurementtraceability system, in combination with the process of downward measurement transfer in relation to the DC charger-based field calibration technology and DC energy meter and shunt calibration technologies, the paper proposed DC fast charging, high DC, small DC voltage output and measuring technologies, and built a time-based plan by converting high DC voltage into low voltage and high current into low current and then into low voltage, leaving DC energy traceable to national standards in terms of voltage, current and time and thus filling in the gap in DC energy measurement traceability.

New trends in the system regulating the market of bank services

The severity of the last financial crisis for the European financial markets, the economy, and society makes the scientists and financial analysts start to seek answers with great openness not only to the question of how to reduce its negative effects in the future, but also of how the system regulating financial institutions will look like in the future. The article discusses three options of the positions on the future regulatory tendencies: theoretical alternative, option presented in reports and expert studies, and the version arising from observations of the current practices of functioning of the European banks. The aim of the article is to confront the views on the future trends in the regulation of the banking sector from theoretical, consulting point of view, and the view formulated on the basis of evalua-tion of banking practices.

A survey on barcode RFID and NFC

Over the recent years, many industries have started implementing new technologies for tracing and tracking their products. These technologies are a kind of blessing to their management system. The technology and management system has to work in parallel to avoid loopholes in the system. We can see so many technologies around us and the most difficult and important part is to choose best out of all these new technologies. The important point which we need to take care while choosing a technology for the system is to make sure the technology can integrate properly with the other parameters in the management system. The industry management system consists of many levels such as initial level, intermediate level, final level and tracking. Nowadays tracking a product from its initial stage is becoming a trend. To cope up with this upcoming trend and also with the company demand, integrating the product with Barcode, RFID tags, NFC tag or any other traceable technology. Many supply chain Management system are also adopting this techniques.

NFC-Based Traceability in the Food Chain

In recent years, many events related to food and public health, such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, commonly known as mad cow disease), dioxin, bird flu and swine flu, brought the issue of food security to the center of international attention. Many countries established strict rules to ensure the food traceability “from farm to fork” to meet the demand of consumer safety and to ensure public health. Consequently, the concepts of controlled supply chain, brand of quality and traceability of food products have had a strong evolution. Companies in the food production sector must evolve and change their organizational and management chain to satisfy increasingly stringent government rules and to respond to the requirements of the market. From this point of view, NFC (Near Field Communication) has all the requirements to become the main technology for traceability in the various food sectors. This paper proposes a solution to gather information throughout the entire food supply chain and bring it directly to the consumer. The architecture consists of a complex identification system based on NFC tags, which cumulates data during all phases of the production process. The aim of this work is to keep track of the information generated during food processing, not only for traceability purposes, but also for enhancing and optimizing production. The data generated by the traceability system are collected in a cloud database through apps on Android smartphones. The information is accessible by the consumers through a public Android application. The pork supply chain has been used as an application example of the proposed methodology.

Current Barriers to Large-scale Interoperability of Traceability Technology in the Seafood Sector.

Interoperability is a critical component of full‐chain digital traceability, but is almost nonexistent in the seafood industry. Using both quantitative and qualitative methodology, this study explores the barriers impeding progress toward large‐scale interoperability among digital traceability systems in the seafood sector from the perspectives of seafood companies, technology vendors, and supply chains as a whole. We highlight lessons from recent research and field work focused on implementing traceability across full supply chains and make some recommendations for next steps in terms of overcoming challenges and scaling current efforts.