Microservice-based Middleware for Collaborative Supply Chain Tracing

Food quality and origin has become, in recent years, one of the concerns for the consumers both nationally and globally. Portugal lacks a tracing system for food products with operator collaboration to build a knowledgebase that contains the traceability information about the products travelling through the entire supply chain. This article presents a microservices oriented software architecture implementation for a middleware that allows the logically centralized collection and processing of traceability data to provide transparency to the consumers and provide data analysts with a source of data to gain new insights on the whole supply chain. Another goal of the middleware is to store and provide other descriptive information about the business, people and processes that comprise the supply chain to enable the creation of stories about the lifecycle of the food from the start of it life to just before it reaches the end consumer's shopping basket.