Master thesis : Digitizing the Food Chain Traceability

Abstract

The traceability in the food sector has become increasingly important. Traceability systems are used to determine the on-going location of products and to trace products back to their origin and used production methods. Such systems are indispensable to provide transparency and security to consumers. To achieve this, an efficient traceability system must therefore provide current information about the food supply chain items in real time. This is possible by building digital traceability systems. In this paper, the use of a graph database is proposed to facilitate and improve the performance of traceability requests. This system is presented by detailing the different aspects taken into account during its design. Particular efforts have been made to establish a maintainable and easy to evolve system. This new solution is finally compared to a naive system relying on a classical relational database. Overall, utilizing a graph database proved to simplify the food traceability analysis and offers better query response times.