An Internet-of-Things solution for food safety and quality control: A pilot project in China

Serval shaking-world food safety incidents happened in China recently shows that Chinese are facing with a serious problem of food safety, happened in China recently. Because food supplies are decentralized in many regions and agencies, it is very hard for the Chinese government to supervise these supplies' businesses. Fortunately, with the help of the technologies of the Internet of Things, the food supplies can become more transparent and safer than before. Hence, on the basis of the Internet of Things, this paper introduces a pilot project in China: the Internet of Agricultural Things (AIoT for short), which integrates state-of-the-art technologies to provide a method to easily track and trace the supply processes of foods. So that, AIoT can counter the food safety problem. In AIoT, we leverage the enhanced technologies of service oriented architecture, global identification and parsing, and electronic pedigree. Especially, AIoT may fuse the sensed data from the supply chains of fresh vegetables to show an intuitive view for users, including end customers. These fusions may help the users make decisions more easily when they are buying foods or supervising the food supplies. In addition, we deploy AIoT in several application scenarios, including Lushang Ltd., the biggest food supplier in Shangdong Province. According to the deployment and evaluation of the whole platform, the enhanced technologies for the Internet of Agricultural Things are proved to be efficient and effective in improving the safety of food supplies.