(A) study of sustainable design of the ePedigree traceability system for the food safety in the agricultural supply chain

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In the food industry, food-borne diseases and chemical contamination pose
a serious threat to human health and safety, induce significant economic losses and
cause environmental damage due to food wastage. The food safety and quality have
attained much public concern due to widespread diseases. Many agricultural pests
and diseases exist worldwide that could be introduced into any country's
agriculture food supply chain as a food fraud through imported agriculture food
products. Food Fraud is an illegal deception for economic gain using food. These
issues arise many challenges for the food supply chains in present time as well as
for future. To address these challenges in the food chains, it is important to develop
systems that can monitor the condition, track the history of agriculture food
products and protect the food supply chains from counterfeit food products.
Another aspect for food chains is the growing awareness of people about
the sustainability of food chains. Food chains need to be more sustainable in order
to maintain consumer health and to efficiently sustain the growing demand for food.
The three basic ingredients of sustainability are social, economic and the
environment. The food quality and safety have a big impact on the food
sustainability as low-quality food can severely affect human health, cause financial
and raw material losses, and create environmental pollution as food wastage. These
problems become more significant due to the globalization and international free
trade of food. To ensure the public health and sustainability in food chains, it is
essential to develop an efficient monitoring system that can address such issues in
food chains.
An electronic pedigree (ePedigree) system is proposed in this research
which is based on the integration of the RFID, ePedigree and WSN (Wireless
Sensor Network) in order to maintain the quality and forbid the distribution of
II
adulterated food products throughout the supply chain. But the data collected from
sensor network throughout the complete supply chain subject to many problems
and source of errors. One of such problems is missing values/data due to several
reasons. This study utilizes the data mining technique to predict the missing sensor
data. The results obtained from the case-study show that our proposed system gives
the benefit to the managers as well as to the customers by providing real-time
location as well as complete temperature-humidity history.
Furthermore, the performance evaluation of the proposed ePedigree
systems is also presented to facilitate the implementation in the food chains. This
ePedigree system not only ensures the quality of the agriculture food products but
also restrict the entry of illegal contaminated food into safe distribution channels. It
helps to attain the sustainable development in the food industry. We have
developed a prototype of the ePedigree application and tested the proposed
architecture using simulation to evaluate the feasibility of the design. Additionally,
a comprehensive analysis of the proposed ePedigree system is presented with
respect to the different aspects of sustainability in order to highlight the benefits
that can be achieved by implementing the proposed system. Finally, based on the
results of performance evaluation, we provide guidelines for businesses interested
in the implementation of the ePedigree traceability system.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Chapter One: Introduction 1
• 1.1 Research Background 1
• 1.1.1 Food Quality Monitoring 1
• 1.1.2. Problem of Counterfeiting in Food industry 4
• 1.2. Aims and Objectives of the Study 8
• 1.3. Significance of the Study 10
• 1.4. Outline of the Thesis 11
• Chapter Two: Literature Review 12
• 2.1. Food Quality Monitoring Systems in Literature 12
• 2.1.1. Traceability for Food Quality 13
• 2.2. Food Counterfeiting/ Adulteration in Literature 16
• 2.2.1. Food Fraud Definition 16
• 2.2.2. Food Fraud Cases 16
• 2.3. Sustainability in food chains 21
• 2.3.1. Sustainability 21
• 2.4. Technical Systems Definitions 22
• 2.4.1 EPCglobal Network 22
• 2.4.2. Electronic-Pedigree 24
• 2.4.3. Sensor Network 26
• Chapter Three: Research Framework and Methodology 29
• 3.1. Research Framework 29
• 3.2. Detail of Appended Papers in Thesis 30
• 3.3. Methodology 31
• 3.3.1. Requirement Analysis for RFID and WSN Integration 31
• 3.3.2 Cost Analysis to select an Economic Integration Solution 33
• 3.3.3. Architectural framework of the ePedigree Traceability System 36
• 3.3.4. ePedigree data Capture and Query framework 40
• 3.3.5. ePedigree Query Algorithm 43
• 3.3.6. Use Case design of the ePedigree Traceability System 45
• 3.3.7 Entity Relationship Diagram for the ePedigree Traceability System 48
• 3.4. ePedigree Digital Signature 50
• 3.4.1. Digital Signature Generation 50
• 3.4.2. ePedigree Document Verification 51
• Chapter Four: ePedigree System Development 53
• 4.1. EPCIS and Sensor Databases Development 53
• 4.2. Capture and Query Interface Design 54
• 4.2.1 Capture Application 54
• 4.2.2. Query Application 56
• 4.2.2.1. Result interfaces 57
• Chapter Five. ePedigree Traceability System Implementation 60
• 5.1 Implementation in laboratory 60
• 5.1.1 Equipment Specifications 60
• 5.1.2 Experimentation 61
• 5.2. Field Implementation: A case Study of Kimchi Supply Chain 63
• 5.2.1. Equipment Specifications 65
• 5.2.2 System Implementation 67
• 5.3 Data Mining for Complete Sensor Data Visibility 70
• Chapter Six: ePedigree Traceability System Performance Evaluation 76
• 6.1 RFID reader Performance Evaluation 76
• 6.2 Performance Evaluation of the ePedigree Traceability System's 77
• 6.2.1 Experimental Setup 81
• 6.2.1.1 Performance Comparison of EPCIS Traceability system with ePedigree Traceability System 82
• 6.2.1.2 Performance Comparison of the Centralized and Distributed ePedigree Traceability System 86
• 6.2.1.3 Impact of Query clients on the performance of the ePedigree Traceability System 89
• 6.3 Performance Evaluation of the Sensor Monitoring Setup of the ePedigree Traceability System 92
• 6.3.1 Analysis of the Energy utilize and memory consume by the WSN gateway (Smartphone) 93
• 6.3.2 WSN Communication Reliability 94
• 6.4 Performance Evaluation and Validation of the Data-mining Model 95
• 6.5. Discussion and Conclusion 99
• Chapter Seven: ePedigree Food Traceability System comparison with other Food Standard Systems and Standards 102
• 7.1. International Standards for Food Quality and Safety 103
• 7.1.1 Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC) 103
• 7.1.2 Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) 104
• 7.1.3 ISO and FOOD 105
• 7.2 Compatibility analysis of the ePedigree Traceability System with the International Food Standards 105
• 7.2.1 Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) 106
• 7.2.2 British Retail Consortium (BRC) 107
• 7.2.3 FSSC 22000 (Food Safety System Certification) 108
• 7.2.4 EU regulation 178/2002 (European Union General Food Law) 109
• 7.2.5 ISO 22005:2007 (Traceability in Food Chain) 110