Smart Sensing, Communication, and Control in Perishable Food Supply Chain

Transportation and distribution (T&D) of fresh food products is a substantial and increasing part of the economic activities throughout the world. Unfortunately, fresh food T&D not only suffers from significant spoilage and waste, but also from dismal efficiency due to tight transit timing constraints between the availability of harvested food until its delivery to the retailer. Fresh food is also easily contaminated, and together with deteriorated fresh food is responsible for much of food-borne illnesses. The logistics operations are undergoing rapid transformation on multiple fronts, including infusion of information technology in the logistics operations, automation in the physical product handling, standardization of labeling, addressing and packaging, and shared logistics operations under 3rd party logistics (3PL) and related models. In this article, we discuss how these developments can be exploited to turn fresh food logistics into an intelligent cyberphysical system driven by online monitoring and associated operational control to enhance food freshness and safety, reduce food waste, and increase T&D efficiency. Some of the issues discussed in this context are fresh food quality deterioration processes, food quality/contamination sensing technologies, communication technologies for transmitting sensed data through the challenging fresh food media, intelligent management of the T&D pipeline, and various other operational issues. The purpose of this article is to stimulate further research in this important emerging area that lies at the intersection of computing and logistics.