Supply Chains present many research challenges in Computing, such as the modeling of theirs processes, communication problems between theirs components, logistics and processes management. This paper presents a supply chain traceability model that relies on a Web service-based architecture to ensure interoperability. Geared towards assisting quality control in the agricultural domain, the model...

An organization’s long-term viability and competitiveness should not be evaluated solely in terms of financial measures. Investors, policy makers, and other stakeholders increasingly seek to evaluate performance with respect to sustainability—the environmental, social, and economic performance of an organization. But measuring and improving the sustainability performance of supply chains is cha...

The establishment and management of information infrastructures in chains and beyond is a prerequisite for the implementation of the emerging comprehensive requirements on tracking, tracing and quality assurance in agriculture and the food sector. They support the guarantee of food safety and the focus on consumers’ quality needs. The challenge for the sector is the agreement on, and the implem...

The last decade has seen an increasing interest in indicators of supply-chain performance. A large number of various performance indicators have been used to characterize supply chains, ranging from highly qualitative indicators like customer or employee satisfaction to quantitative indicators like return on investments. This large number of different performance indicators, and the lack of con...

Introduction The food supply chain despite being heavily regulated is increasingly in the spotlight for safety scares, recalls and disruptions. Public focus on these issues has also grown following increasing consumer concerns and its consequential costs imposed on the society.(Fearne, Hornibrook et al. 2001). Food supply chains of today are particularly fragile owing to the geographic, economi...

Traceability in food chains will be mandatory in the near future for the most companies interested in food processing. Every food chain is made up of a variable number of companies. To realize a full traceability system we propose 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...

In this paper we study a mathematical model of two parallel food chains in a chemostat. Each food chain consists of a prey species x and a predator species y. Two food chains are symmetric in the sense that the prey species are identical and so are the specialized predator species. We assume that both of the prey species in the parallel food chains share the same nutrient R. In this paper we sh...

Hairston, Slobodkin, and Smith conjectured that top down forces act on food chains, which opposed the previously accepted theory that bottom up forces exclusively dictate the dynamics of populations. We model food chains using the Lotka-Volterra predation model and derive sustainability constants which determine which species will persist or go extinct. Further, we show that the productivity of...