Food supply chain management system based on RFID radio frequency identification

In recent years, the outbreak of various food safety questions has aroused widespread concern in society. Since food safety is directly related to human life and health, every consumer hopes to buy healthy, safe and assured food and to have sufficient food safety information. In order to ensure the health of consumers and the demand for social stability and economic development, the importance of implementing food safety monitoring through a visual food supply chain management system has become increasingly prominent. With the development of information technology, people realize the exchange of electronic data by establishing EDI platform. Radio frequency identification technology (RFID), as a new identification technology, makes food safety monitoring more mature.

2 RFID technology and its application in the food industry

RFID is a non-contact automatic identification technology, mainly through the radio frequency signal to automatically identify the target object and obtain relevant information, without manual intervention, can accurately identify moving objects in various states (static, moving and even harsh environments). RFID technology has the characteristics of small size, large capacity, long life, strong penetration, reusability, support for high-speed reading and writing, positioning and long-term tracking management, and has great application potential in food safety and quality management.

The outbreak of mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth disease has made western developed countries put forward very high requirements for food safety tracking, and they also have advanced development in the application of RFID in this area.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommends that pharmaceutical companies use RFID technology to trace and track suspicious drugs since 2006. The British MarksSpence supermarket uses RFID electronic tags to manage the supply chain of fresh food. The cost of using this technology is 1/10 of the cost of using barcodes, which greatly saves resources and improves the management efficiency of the supply chain. SYSCO, the largest food service marketing and distribution organization in North America, has completed RFID and sensing system testing for low-temperature storage and transportation systems, proving that RFID has a strong ability to monitor temperature and environmental conditions during food transportation, and can effectively ensure food quality and quality. Safety. In the domestic food safety field, RFID products have also been officially used. The "Safe Pork Monitoring and Traceability System" based on RFID technology was officially put into use in Shanghai in 2005. The system puts RFID tags on pig ears and obtains real-time pig feed, medical records, medicine feeding, group transfer, quarantine and other information. The system has been used in 57 large-scale pig farms in Shanghai and East China.

3.1 RFID-based tracking and tracing system model

The RFID-based tracking and tracing system model includes RFID data acquisition system, RFID information service system and application software (such as logistics decision-making system, etc.). Figure 1 is a simplified diagram of a centrally managed track and trace system model.

The working principle of this model is as follows: (1) Through the wireless communication form of RFID, the data stored on the electronic tag is transmitted to the reader; (2) After the data collected by the reader is filtered by the middleware, the duplicate data is filtered out. Generate an event sequence and transmit it to the enterprise application software; (3) The enterprise application software accesses the information server indicated by the electronic label information through the Internet or a local area network to obtain the relevant information of the product. The information service system of this model is relatively centralized, and is maintained by the product manufacturer or an i-party organization, and a relatively closed system can be established, mainly for the tracking and tracing of individual enterprise products. This is in line with the current development of the domestic traceability system.

3.2 Food Supply Chain Management System

Corresponding to the above model, the RFID food supply chain management system is generally composed of RFID tags/readers, RFID middleware and RFID application systems.

(1) RFID tags/readers. RFID tags are attached to the raw materials, semi-finished products, outer packaging surfaces of finished products, and shipping pallets, which record the entity's attribute information and related operational information. RFID readers are deployed at key nodes in the supply chain to read the information in food RFID tags in real time, and transmit them to the RFID middleware along with the reader's own attributes and reading time.

(2) RFID middleware. RFID middleware is responsible for realizing information exchange and management with RFID hardware and supporting equipment, and at the same time, as a bridge of software and hardware integration, completes information exchange with the upper-level complex application system. The middleware is connected to the RFID reader and accepts RFID data from the reader. It has the functions of data collection, filtering, integration and transmission, so as to transmit correct object information to the back-end application system, thereby reducing the complexity of structure and maintenance.

(3) RFID application system. The RFID application system is an information management system that integrates RFID data with business logic in the food supply chain. It can execute pre-established business logic on virtual data objects sent from RFID middleware. We apply this model to the food industry to form a tool for integrating food supply chains, the basic structure of which is shown in Figure 2.

RFID system mainly has i functions: information collection, information transmission and information management. Information collection is a prerequisite for realizing information flow, information transmission realizes the continuity of information flow, and the effective management and application of information realizes the value of information flow. These functions run through all aspects of production, warehousing, transportation and sales, and can completely monitor and manage the food supply chain. In this food supply chain system, RFID readers are installed between raw material bases, processing plants, food warehouses, sales outlets and other links to perform information collection. After filtering and integration by RFID middleware, the tag information is transmitted to the information control center. As the public information service subsystem in the whole system, the information control center controls all the information in the system, and the control information is then transmitted to each link by the middleware to complete the appropriate operation.

According to the functions and characteristics of each link in the food supply chain system, we should choose different RFID tag forms:

(1) In the production and processing process, each batch of raw materials transported from the raw material base to the processing factory is accompanied by an RFID tag, which mainly records the relevant information of production and breeding, such as the farm number, delivery time, delivery batch And so on, the information is linked with the production enterprise's own internal information system database. After the production and processing, the processing information of the node should also be written on the label, and then packaged and placed on a pallet with an RFID label for transportation and storage.

(2) In the process of food warehousing, by scanning the RFID tags pasted on the pallets when entering and leaving the warehouse, the system can clearly know the marking, origin, storage and transportation history, destination, Expiry date and other information. Food inventory can be precisely monitored by automatically scanning RFID tags. When the stock quantity is close to or less than the safety stock quantity, the system will automatically make a prompt, and formulate an order plan at a high speed according to the order model, and send it to the processing factory after confirmation by the stock manager.

(3) In the process of food distribution and scheduling, the system reasonably allocates food supply according to the historical sales data of each sales outlet and the real-time feedback of sales status information. After the food arrives at each sales outlet, it is scanned and entered into the sales warehouse to establish the warehousing information. When the food inventory cannot be replenished in time, it can also send information to other sales outlets to allocate excess inventory.

(4) In the food sales process, after the sales staff scans the video out of the warehouse, in the actual sales process, establishes a data link between a single food and customers, and feeds back food sales information to the food warehouse in real time, so as to formulate purchase, Planning decisions such as replenishment.

4 Analysis of system advantages and doubts based on RFID technology

4.1 Comparison of RFID and other tracking technologies

At present, there are not many means for food supply chain management, and it is difficult to perform real-time monitoring of the entire system with traditional skills. Barcode technology has been widely used in the food industry, and barcode technology has developed rapidly in the past few decades, and two-dimensional barcodes have been developed on the basis of original one-dimensional barcodes. However, one-dimensional barcodes are relatively large in size, not suitable for use on smaller items, and are not fault-tolerant, and cannot be read under wear or dirty conditions. The two-dimensional barcode belongs to the category of electronic identification, which improves the automatic acquisition ability of the identification mark, but its acquisition front end belongs to the optical signal acquisition device, which is easily affected by the physical environment such as light, fog and dirt. At the same time, barcode technology can only use manual methods to perform short-range reading, and cannot obtain the quality information of large quantities of food in real time and at high speed, and it cannot provide real-time records of the environmental information of food in the circulation link.

On its own, RFID has clear advantages in many ways. In terms of the number of readings, only one barcode can be read at a time, and RFID can read multiple RFID tag data at the same time; for long-distance reading, light is required for barcode reading, and RFID tags can be read or updated without light. ; In terms of data capacity, the data capacity of RFID storage is much larger than that of barcode.