Food safety pre-warning system based on data mining for a sustainable food supply chain

•Food safety pre-warning system can enhance the sustainability of food supply chain.•Pre-warning system reduced the cost related food safety and quality.•Data mining were effective to find food safety pre-warning rules.•Internet of Things strengthened the communication among partners in a supply chain.

In recent years, the food safety incidents happened frequently in china, and then the problems related to food quality and safety have attracted more and more social attention. Considering the concern with regard to quality sustainability in food supply chain, many companies have developed a real time data monitoring system to ensure products quality in the supply chain network. In this paper, we proposed a food safety pre-warning system, adopting association rule mining and Internet of Things technology, to timely monitor all the detection data of the whole supply chain and automatically pre-warn. The aim of pre-warning system is to help managers in food manufacturing firm to find food safety risk in advance, and to give some decision support information to maintain the quality and safety of food products. A case study of a dairy producer was conducted, and the results showed that the proposed pre-warning system can effectively identify safety risks and accurately determine whether a warning should be issued, depending on the expert analysis when an abnormality is detected by the system. In addition, implications of the proposed approach were discussed, and suggestions for future work were outlined.