With the rapid proliferation of RFID systems in global supply chain management,
tracking every object at the individual item level has led to the generation of enormous
amount of data that will have to be stored and accessed quickly to make real time
decisions. This is especially critical for perishable goods supply chain such as fruits
and pharmaceuticals which have enormous value tied up in assets and may become
worthless if they are not kept in precisely controlled and cool environments. While
Cloud-based RFID solutions are deployed to monitor and track the products from
manufacturer to retailer, we argue that Fog Computing is needed to bring efficiency
and reduce the wastage experienced in the perishable produce supply chain.
This paper investigates in-depth: (i) the application of Fog Computing in perishable
produce supply chain management using blackberry fruit as a case study; (ii)
the data, computations and storage requirements for the fog nodes at each stage of
the supply chain; (iii) the adaptation of the architecture to the general perishable
goods supply chain; and (iv) the benefits of the proposed fog nodes with respect to
monitoring and actuation in the blackberry supply chain
