Modelling and evaluating traceability systems in food manufacturing chains

Traceability in food chains is 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 data, for its ability to cope with different size data structures. WebServices based technology has been adopted to interface different suppliers which communicate through HTTP protocol. A prototype has been implemented and evaluated. Access time is the performance index we chose to discuss in the paper because, considered the complexity of the traceability system and the scattering of the information, it represents a key factor for the users. The performances obtained on the testbed demonstrate the real applicability of this architecture in large production systems.