GTP:Chain traceability functionality
From TraceFood
Contents |
Introduction
Traceability information may be used for different purposes, everything from publishing information about a product's history and origin - trace, to find where certain products are in the value chain based on their "membership" or involvement in specific trace events (like being part of a production batch, ship load, cargo, etc.) - track.
Traceability information may thus have impact on or be applied in, e.g., logistics; food safety issues; fraud detection; sale, stock, and loss monitoring; geographical market penetration; marketing and product profiling etc.
The main or core functionality related to traceability can be generalised to involve building and searching directed graphs of trace events in time where specific traceable units have participated. The main information necessary to build these graphs are by defining nodes and arcs that can be used as starting point for navigation in the constructed traceability graphs.
Functionality
This means that interfaces needs to be defined to both provide functionality for population of the traceability graph as well as providing functionality related to traversing the constructed traceability graph. How the resulting information is used will then be application of the resulting graphs.
Generally, the functionality can be specified as:
1. Find all trace events where a specific traceable item has participated (upstream). This will result in a set of trace events sorted on time - key to this operation is a unique identification of a traceable unit.
2. Find specific information about a trace event. This will result in reporting involved actors and eventually resource used in the trace event - key to this operation is a unique identification of a trace event.
3. Identify involved traceable units in a trace event (incoming and outgoing). This will result in a set of traceable units - key to this operation is a unique identification of a trace event.
4. Track a set of traceable items (downstream). This will result in a set of trace events for every individual traceable item in the origin set.
The first two items described above can be used for getting information about specific traceable items while the latter two can, e.g., be used to find the last known location of traceable items involved in a certain trace event.
Prerequisites
Discovery and interpretation of identifiers
A main issue related to building systems to support such operations, is to provide discovery services where identification keys can be interpreted and eventually provide functionality to navigate the user to the relevant actors and systems that expose information relevant for the specific key.
It is therefore necessary to analyse the different stakeholders and users of a traceability system to identify both which functionality or stakes that are important for the stakeholders, then analyse which information that needs to captured and made electronically available for these stakeholders.
Typical stakeholders would normally be trading partners in the supply chain (including raw material producers), the authorities, and in the case of retail products, the consumers.
Data quality
In a traceability system, it will be important to provide more or less complete traceability graphs to be able to navigate between different actors that somehow have or have had something to do with the traceable unit or trace event. Holes in the traceability graph must be managed to identify and document what these means to the relevant traceability functionality, and eventually to provide interfacing information that can be used to fill holes. E.g., actors that are not participating in the traceability solution may still be part of the traceability graph based on the core traceability data provided by actors that do participate.
