A general approach to model traceability systems in food manufacturing chains

Traceability in food chains is now mandatory for companies interested in food processing. Every food chain is made up of a variable number of companies which cooperate through the exchange of materials and services. Since the guarantee about a product doesn't depend on a single company, but it depends on all the factories of the food chain, a traceability system can provide information useful to reconstruct fully the path the food has followed during its production. To carry out a full traceability system we propose a general approach based on a distributed collaborative information system where every company exchanges traceability data with the others over a network. XML was used as the format to represent data, for its ability to cope with data structures of different size. WebServices based technology has been adopted to interface different suppliers which communicate through HTTP protocol. A prototype has been implemented and some experiments have been performed with the aim to test the usability of the system