Realizing chain-wide transparency in meat supply chains based on global standards and a reference architecture

One of the key concerns in meat supply chains is to provide chain-wide transparency, whereby food operators capture and share transparency data across the supply chain. To meet this concern a chain-wide transparency software system is needed that is able to address the desired stakeholder requirements. Unfortunately, designing and implementing a chain-wide transparency system is not straightforward. In this paper we provide a systematic approach for designing and implementing chain wide transparency systems. To this end, we first present a reference architecture that represents a generic design of such systems. Secondly, we discuss the systematic approach for deriving concrete architectures from the reference architecture based on stakeholders' requirements. Finally, we illustrate our approach with the design and implementation of a transparency system for beef supply chains.</p

Information Needs for Transparency in Blockchain-Enabled Sustainable Food Supply Chains

© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/The growing demand for transparency in sustainable food production creates a challenge for supply chains to meet the diverse information needs of stakeholders. This research addresses this challenge by identifying and prioritising information needs within sustainable food supply chains. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the study identified 14 information needs, categorised them into three clusters: a) product and quality details information, b) production and processing information, and c) sustainability information, and prioritised the information needs. Experts highly prioritised information needs on quality and safety, followed by product origin and nutrition/ingredients. The research suggests that blockchain technology can play a role in supporting consumer decision-making. These findings can inform the development of information-sharing systems that enhance transparency and support consumer decision-making in sustainable food supply chains.Peer reviewe

Plataforma de serviços para monitorização da cadeia de valor do pescado

Traceability in the food value chain is a topic of interest due to the advantages it brings to both the consumers, producers and regulatory authorities. This thesis describes my contributions during the design and implementation of a microservice based middleware for the Portuguese fish value chain considering current practices in the industry and the requirements of the stakeholders involved in the project, with the goal of integrating all the traceability information available from each operator to provide customers with the full story of the products they purchase. During this project I assumed many roles such as development, operations and even some security allowing me to improve my skills in all these fields and experimenting with the latest cloud native technologies such as containers and with DevOps practices.A rastreabilidade na cadeia de valor alimentar é um tema de interesse pelas vantagens que traz aos consumidores, produtores e autoridades reguladoras. Esta dissertação descreve as minhas contribuições durante a conceção e implementação de um middleware baseado em micro-serviços para a cadeia de valor do pescado portuguesa considerando as práticas atuais da indústria e os requisitos das partes interessadas envolvidas no projeto, com o objetivo de integrar toda a informação de rastreabilidade disponível de cada um dos operadores para fornecer aos clientes a história completa dos produtos que adquirem. Durante este projeto, assumi muitas funções, como desenvolvimento, operações e até mesmo alguma segurança, o que me permitiu melhorar as minhas capacidades em todos essas disciplinas e experimentar as mais recentes tecnologias nativas da nuvem, como contentores e práticas de DevOps.Mestrado em Engenharia Informátic

Aligning business processes and IT of multiple collaborating organisations

When multiple organisations want to collaborate with one another they have to integrate their business processes. This requires aligning the collaborative business processes and the underlying IT (Information Technology). Realizing the required alignment is, however, not trivial and is the subject of this thesis. We approached the issue of alignment in three steps. First, we explored business-IT alignment problems in detail in a real-life business case. This is done in order to clarify what alignment of business processes and IT systems across a collaboration network entails. Second, we provided a business-IT alignment framework called BITA* (pronounce bita-star). The framework provides modelling abstractions for alignment. Third, we applied the framework in two real-life case studies, including the real-life business case used in step one. By applying the framework in practice we showed that the framework can, in fact, help to address the business-IT alignment problems that we identified in the first step. The work presented in this thesis is conducted over a number of years in the context of four large EU sponsored research projects. The projects focused on alignment problems in two very distinct application areas. Two projects were about realizing transparency systems for meat supply chains and constitute the first case study. The other two projects were about realizing multidisciplinary modelling collaboration systems and constitute the second case study. Although the projects were conducted sequentially the research questions were addressed iteratively over the years. The research methodology that shows how the framework is designed and how the case studies are applied is discussed in detail in chapter 2. In chapter 3 we present BITA*, a Business-IT Alignment framework for multiple collaborating organisations. The main challenges in designing BITA* have been what models to consider for alignment and how to compare them in order to make explicit statements about alignment. We addressed this problem by introducing allocation and alignment modelling constructs to help the alignment process, and the concept of business collaboration model to represent the models that have to be aligned. We identified three groups of stakeholders for whom we designed explicit design viewpoints and associated allocation and alignment models. The Business Process to Business Process (BP2BP) alignment viewpoint is designed for business analysts who have to align diverse business collaboration process models. The IT to IT (IT2IT) alignment viewpoint is designed for software architects to align the distribution of data and IT systems across a collaboration network. The Business Process to IT (BP2IT) alignment viewpoint is designed for an interdisciplinary team of business analysts and software architects who have to align the different ways of supporting business collaboration processes with distributed IT system. An essential element of this thesis has been elaborating how business-IT alignment problems occur in the context of multi-organisational collaboration. The case studies were used to demonstrate business-IT alignment concerns. Particularly, the details of the first case study presented in chapters 4 and 5 were used in chapter 3 to help derive the alignment framework. The case study presented an ideal problem scenario since realizing transparency across supply chains is intrinsically a collaborative effort. The second case study was used to enhance the validity of our approach. The results of the second case study are presented in chapter 6. The alignment framework was designed during the iterative process we followed when realizing a generic transparency system for meat supply chains. To realize the required generic transparency system we needed a reference architecture. To derive the reference architecture we adapted an already existing and broadly-accepted generic reference architecture. We have to adapt the generic reference architecture in order to address specific requirements of the meat sector that were not considered in the generic reference architecture. The adaptation process made it clear that we needed models for representing business collaborations. We, therefore, introduced the notion of business collaboration model, which we used both to model reference architectures and to adapt them. Adaptation required aligning the generic reference architecture with the diverse business collaboration models adopted by the organisations that have to collaborate. The alignment framework is thus used for adapting a generic reference architecture in order to create a reference architecture that the collaborating organisations can, and are willing to, adopt. We identified three types of business collaboration models: business collaboration process model, business collaboration IT model, and a model for representing the relationship between these two. A business collaboration process model is a business process model that spans a collaboration network. A business collaboration IT model is a model of the distribution of the IT across the collaboration network. A business collaboration process-IT model is a model of the relationships between the elements of the business collaboration processes and the elements of the distributed IT. Each organisation is considered to adopt its own business collaboration models. For instance, different actors in meat supply chains have different views on how chain-wide transparency should be realized. Which business processes and IT systems each organisation has to deploy and use depends on the business collaboration models each food operator adopts. If two different food operators adopt the same set of business collaboration models, they are aligned; otherwise they are misaligned. Hence, alignment entails comparing the different business collaboration models adopted by the participating organisations. The results of the alignment process are explicit statements about how convergent or divergent the organisations are from the chosen generic reference architecture. The explicit statements of alignment guide how best the generic and the corresponding organisational business collaboration models can be adapted to create a better state of alignment. To further enhance the validity of the overall approach the second case study was conducted. The second case study was a retrospective investigation of two past research projects focusing on aligning environmental modelling processes and IT systems. A retrospective case study was chosen because launching a new business-IT alignment project involving multiple collaborating organisations was not feasible. The projects were undertaken to support the European Water Framework Directive, which mandated, among other things, participatory, multidisciplinary, river-basin wide and model-based studies to manage the water resources of Europe. The directive particularly required a collaborative approach to building environmental decision support systems and to deriving methodologies for applying existing decision support systems. We applied BITA* to aligning environmental modelling processes and IT systems in order to evaluate the suitability of the framework to addressing alignment problems in other application areas. The contributions of the thesis are summarized in chapter 7. The contributions include a number of design artefacts, which can be grouped into four categories: constructs, models, methods, and instantiations. The contribution in the first category includes the conceptualization of allocation and alignment. The contributions in the second category include allocation and alignment models, and reference architectures. Allocation models are representations of business collaboration models in a form that can be compared and are the basis for alignment modelling. The main contribution in the third category is the BITA* systematic approach to alignment modelling. The contributions in the fourth category are the software systems developed with the help of the reference architectures.</p

Stochastic optimization in perishable food supply chain: a holistic approach

Doctor of PhilosophyDepartment of Industrial & Manufacturing Systems EngineeringAshesh K. SinhaWith continuous expansion in world population, total food demand across the globe is anticipated to increase by 56% within a span of 30 years. Predictions state that food production needs to increase by 70% and adhere to quality standards. Better informed consumers now want to have precise knowledge about the origin of food till it reaches the final shelves of the supermarket. Perishable food supply chain is a complex network involving multiple stakeholders and several interconnected stages. Presence of uncertainties like demand, outbreak, or contamination and a limited product shelf life adds further complexity and the need to uphold food quality and safety standards throughout the supply chain, from crop production to consumers. Without traceability in food supply chains, severe problems of product recall, consumer dissatisfaction, and contamination insecurities have occurred in the past. The lack of a transparent system resulted in food loss and aggravated the global challenge of feeding a growing population. In contrast to centralized systems which lack trustworthy information and deterministic optimization models, our goal is to incorporate a dynamic system like blockchain to monitor the quality of food, keeping the entire network transparent among the stakeholders, embedded with stochastic models to make it a robustly optimized supply chain. This research develops stochastic optimization models to comprehensively combat uncertainty in item quality, transportation of perishable items (not limited to the ones considered below) and provide network transparency. We consider sausage, wheat, and cheese as perishable products for our research. First, we examine a five-level sausage supply chain where at each level, the output product is manufactured by combining/mixing correct proportions of the raw materials from the previous stage. The demand for the final product is uncertain. We develop a two-stage stochastic model and analyze it using the L-shaped algorithm to improve traceability, optimize dispersion, and fulfil demand among the batches. Next, to maintain safety standards, detailed wheat and cheese supply chains are analyzed separately to filter relevant parameters responsible for food quality at any point in the network. We implement Q-learning algorithm to optimize values of parameters based on which the decision maker can choose the best or worst decision in determining the quality of the perishable product. Later, we analyze a large-scale rich tanker trailer routing problem with stochastic transit times for perishable bulk orders. Unlike classical transportation problems, bulk transportation falls under the umbrella of rich vehicle routing problems that involve several intermingled decisions. Typically, the bulk orders are characterized by a set of attributes consisting of an origin-destination location pair, pickup and delivery time windows, order specification, restrictions based on prior orders of food leading to incompatibility, and possibly special equipment (washed and prepped) or handling instructions. We propose concepts of a novel graph decomposition algorithm, column generation and shortest path to generate feasible optimal routes and account for incompatibility constraints. We overcome the challenge of network transparency by storing supply chain data in a decentralized ledger, blockchain where data is visible to all stakeholders but immune to tampering, thus enabling transparency