Supervisory control and quality assurance in food industry

The present paper describes the results of an interdisciplinary research project that combines knowledge from the domains of food processing, quality assurance, business modeling and ITC technologies in order to offer a general traceability solution for the Romanian food industry. This research complies with European Union's agricultural regulations which impose that food products must be accompanied along the whole producer-consumer chain, by documents regarding their origin, processing mode and quality. The project's main goal is to design an integrated traceability and quality assurance information system for a generic food processing unit. The proposed system gives a global perspective to other business actors such as primary producers, distributors, retailers, warehouses, etc. The traceability system covers the following main functionalities: food processing lines' monitoring and supervision, traceability and quality information generation and recording and business-to-business data exchange. In order to assure scalability and flexibility a multi-layer architecture was adopted, with a data management layer, an intra/inter-business layer and a unified GUI layer. The system is based on a service oriented architecture, uses Web services for data exchange and combines other new ITC technologies such as: SOAP, XML, WSDL, UDDI, and BPEL.