A real-time food safety management system for receiving operations in distribution centers

Food safety plan is being promoted in the food industry by the Hong Kong Government as a preliminary quality control tool. However, it appears to be a challenging task for Distribution Centers (DC) that handles food inventory since most of them are lack of knowledge and know how technology to manage information in a real time base. This paper proposes a Radio Frequency Identification based Food Operations Assignment System (RFID-FOAS) to help DC facilitates the food safety control activities in receiving areas by generating a proper safety plan. The system has adopted the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology and the Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) technique to facilitate the inventory data-capturing process and assist in formulating decisions, respectively. The developed system aims to help reduce the difficulties in safety plan development using a knowledge-based expert system. The significance and contribution of RFID-FOAS in the context of managing the inventory quality in DC for safety plan development is demonstrated through the adoption of the system in a Hong Kong-based logistics company. The generated results show that the decision-making process of the safety plan development is facilitated. Moreover, the real-time data capturing nature of RFID technology has further improved the efficiency and timeframe requested for the actions. With the support of RFID-FOAS, the data capture system and the decision-making time is minimized. As a result, inventory quality and customer satisfaction level are significantly improved.