Food Safety & Traceability is in the news with stories ranging
from food safety, diseases, and fears of bioterrorism to the
consumer’s right to know. Many developments like RFID (Wireless)
tracking have focused on tracking cattle from birth to finished
product to control the risk of mad cow disease, on tracking food
shipments to reduce the risk of tampering. There has also a
concerted effort to provide information to consumers about food
attributes like country of origin, animal welfare, and genetic
composition.
The task of ensuring the safety and traceability of food from the
‘Farm to the Fork’ is a challenging one. It is believed that a
number of issues in almost every sphere of food production,
marketing and distribution will need to be studied and resolved to
ensure the safety of food supply.
The University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign has launched a
cross campus initiative to study and resolve issues that are
faced by business, communities and academics alike in their quest
for a safe and secure food supply.
We, at the Team Engineering Collaboratory (TEC) are a part of this
initiative and it is our goal to apply Social Network Methods to:
1.
Identify organizations in the supply chain/network whose
collaboration and commitment are essential to the implementation
of new business and traceability models for a product.
2.
Identify constructs that can be used to identify
organizations and relationships that are vital to this network.
3.
Build accurate and generalized
agent based models to simulate the supply chain dynamics.
4.
Analyze the role of human perceptions e.g. risk and its
effect on supply chains / networks.
Links
For further information please contact
Noshir
Contractor
nosh@uiuc.edu
Anish
Keskar
keskar@uiuc.edu
