Agri-Food Supply Chain Traceability Supported by a Formal Ontology: A Grain Elevator to Processor Use Case

Published

August 23, 2023

Author(s)

Farhad Ameri, Evan K. Wallace, Reid Yoder, Frank Riddick

Abstract

Traceability of food products to their sources is critical for quick responses to food emergencies. However, having the complete and consistent information needed to quickly investi-gate sources and identify affected material has proven diffi-cult. Food traceability is challenging for a variety of reasons including diversity and heterogenicity of participants, complex-ity of the supply chain and its processes and lack of a common understanding of steps in a supply chain, and incompleteness of data, and unwillingness of actors to expose information of their internal operations. The objective of this work is to ad-dress the traceability challenge by developing a formal ontolo-gy that can provide a shared and common understanding of the traceability model across all stakeholders in a food supply chain. In previous research, an ontological approach was adopted to address the traceability problem in the context of a use case related to harvest to on-farm storage activities. This work extends the Supply Chain Traceability ontology by intro-ducing additional critical tracking events including transform event, sampling event, observation event, custody change event, and ownership change event in the context of a scenario involv-ing shipments of commodity grain from a primary grain eleva-tor to a processor of grain such as a feed manufacturer. A knowledge graph is generated based on a simulated dataset and the ontology is validated through query, reasoning, and visualization conducted in the RDFox environment.

Proceedings Title

Proceedings of the ASME 2023 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference IDETC-CIE2023

Conference Dates

August 21-23, 2023

Conference Location

Boston, MA, US

Conference Title

International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference IDETC-CIE2023

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

ontology, supply chain, traceability, traceable resource unit, critical tracking event, interoperability

Citation

Ameri, F. , Wallace, E. , Yoder, R. and Riddick, F. (2023), Agri-Food Supply Chain Traceability Supported by a Formal Ontology: A Grain Elevator to Processor Use Case, Proceedings of the ASME 2023 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference IDETC-CIE2023, Boston, MA, US, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=956484 (Accessed September 26, 2024)