An integrated IoT Architecture to Monitor Food Quality along the Supply Chain

Abstract

Drop in nutrition value during food logistics impacts the health of consumers. Vegetables, fruits, fish, milk lose nutrients during logistics if it is not properly monitored. Real-time tracking and monitoring, large data handling and secure business transactions are key to the effective operation of supply chains. The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us the need for handling unforeseen situations in various sectors. Limitations to logistic operations, inaccessible warehouses, shutdown of consumer outlets for an unexpected duration, have affected the supply chain drastically. This has laid emphasis on the need for technology-based solutions that can monitor, control and make quick decisions, that can reduce losses. With this scenario as a background, a system architecture has been proposed to detect the nutrient value of food by periodically monitoring temperature and humidity in real-time and alerting the cold chain entities in cold chain environments. This architecture is proposed as an integration of Internet of Things (IoT) with cloud-based storage, to provide real-time data collection at the end-user, seamless storage and computation in the cloud and secure transactions at the business layer. An experimental setup of the system architecture has been configured and the implementation has been tested at a preliminary level. The performance of the application is analyzed and the proposed web application is efficient for large scale supply chain applications, provided scaling of hardware resources.