Design and development of a Traceability Service for EPC-enabled food supply chains

Traceability has become an increasingly important issue for food industries. Recently, the development of Auto-ID technologies, especially RFID technology, has brought new opportunities to improve the tracking and tracing process in food supply chains. In order to establish a standardized infrastructure of Auto-ID data exchange among different supply chain partners, the EPCglobal consortium has defined a set of EPC network standards, which are intended to enable EPC-related data sharing and thus increase supply chain visibility. Since a traceability system usually involves many trading participants, a Discovery Service is needed to find and link EPC events from different distributed EPCIS servers. The Discovery Service is a key component for enabling traceability in supply chains, which is now still under development in both academia and industry. This work designs a Traceability Service for EPC-enabled food supply chains that is based on the state-of-the-art research and extends the architecture of the Aggregating Discovery Service. Furthermore, a demo is implemented that could provide a proof of concept prototype for EPC-network-enabled traceability for the food sector.