EDI - XML Standards and Technologies in the Agri-Food Industry

Due to globalisation, the new technological developments and the complexity of food supply processes, the European food sector is increasingly becoming more complex. The consumers’ trust in food, triggered and affected by a number of food crises, is low. Today, consumers increasingly expect safe and high quality food and demand information about the origin of their food. Also, the economic health of the food industry can be greatly affected by food crises; therefore, efficient and effective mechanisms are required to assist the food industry in tracking and tracing products along the food chain. In this paper, we discuss the criteria for an efficient and effective traceability system from an IT perspective (mainly data exchange) and we identify key requirements for ICT enabled traceability

Traceability requirements for information systems in the agro-food sector

Food safety and quality are keys to companies' business survival and great effort and resources are devoted to them. The food production chain, from the farms and feed mills to the finished products leaving the processing plants, is subject to independent examination and auditing either under the sector's own assurance schemes under official regulatory inspection and testing programmes with published results. For farmers and the agro-food industry, this means new market opportunities – and continual change. Food safety is an on-going challenge, demanding the best control systems and day-to-day vigilance on farms, in processing plants and throughout the distribution system. In order to enable consumers to make the right choice when buying their food and in order to build up markets for quality products, labelling has to provide all relevant information about the production process. Besides complete information about its ingredients, food labels should bear information about its place of origin and the way in which it was produced

Quality control and product tracing in ERP systems

Food safety and quality are keys to companies' business survival and great efforts and resources are devoted to them. This is an on-going challenge, demanding the best control systems and day- to-day vigilance on farms, in processing plants and throughout the distribution system. The product quality of the Hungarian meet industry meets the high level international standards, because the Hungarian meet industry is an export oriented sector. However, the application of computers and information systems still haven’t got enough emphasis in the food sector, although the majority of companies use ERP systems. IT budgets of Hungarian companies are smaller than of the ones in industrialized countries. They spend 0.49% of their return from sales on IT operation and development. We find different rates among Hungarian owners and foreign owners. The Hungarian ones spend less (0.36%), but foreigners spend twice this amount (0.61) on informatics. Quality control is conducted at several stages of the production flow. The most important targets are basic materials coming from partners, purchased and processed products and foods. We have to be able to identify and determine what ingredients there are in the end-products and what the production and distribution processes were. Sometimes this refers to a process backwards that we have to conduct when we discover a mistake in the production flow or in the quality of the end-product. Back- tracing is a six stage flow in the system. Our paper and lecture describes how the ERP system is built-in food tracing functions and experiences in Hungary

A simple Havel-Hakimi type algorithm to realize graphical degree sequences of directed graphs

One of the simplest ways to decide whether a given finite sequence of positive integers can arise as the degree sequence of a simple graph is the greedy algorithm of Havel and Hakimi. This note extends their approach to directed graphs. It also studies cases of some simple forbidden edge-sets. Finally, it proves a result which is useful to design an MCMC algorithm to find random realizations of prescribed directed degree sequences.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure submitted to "The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics