Food traceability systems: Performance evaluation and optimization

The aim of a traceability system is to collect in a rigorous way all the information related to the displacement of the different products along the supply chain. This information proves essential when facing food safety crisis, and allows efficiently managing the consequent product recall action. Although a recall action could be absolutely critical for a company, both in terms of incurred costs and of media impact, at present most companies do not posses reliable methods to precisely estimate the amount of product that would be discarded in the case of recall. The skill of limiting the quantity of recalled products to the minimum can be assumed as a measure of the performance and of the efficiency of the traceability system adopted by the company. Motivated by this consideration, this paper introduces novel criteria and methodologies for measuring and optimizing the performance of a traceability system. As opposed to previous introduced methods, which optimize indirect measures, the proposed approach takes into direct account the worst-case (or the average) quantity of product that should be recalled in the case of a crisis. Numerical examples concerning the mixing of batches in a sausage production process are reported to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.