A RFID-based decision support system for food receiving operations assignment

Traditionally, a standard operational routine is applied in the food distribution centre (DC) for performing inventory receiving activities. However, with the growth of customized service, different quality checking or value-added activities are requested to perform upon the receiving process. Standard operational routine can no longer be applied as different work stations are needed to involve in different order. With the unstructured working routine and requirements, a long decision time is required during the arrangement of operational paths and, thus human errors occurred easily. As a result, sub-optimal customer satisfaction and long operation time appeared. In this paper, a Real-time Food Receiving operations management System (RFRS) is introduced to help food distribution centre arrange a proper operating procedure for handling the food receiving activities. The proposed system contains a case-based reasoning engine for generating customized operating procedure by retrieving and analyzing relevant knowledge stored in the database and case library. In addition, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is adopted to gather real-time inventory information for visualizing the inventory, work station and equipment status. With the support of RFRS, unstructured operations in the food receiving process can be performed in an organized and efficient way.