Do VIR: Virtualizing Food Donation Distribution through Mobile Application and Cloud-Based Supply Chain Management

摘要

Food insecurity, the lack of access to safe, nutritious and adequate food, has remained a persistent and major problem in our society, particularly in low-income communities. It leads to many serious consequences, including hunger, malnutrition in children, poor health conditions in adults and early mortality. One direction to address food insecurity is to facilitate streamlined food donation from communities with surplus food. In this paper, we present an approach, DOVIR, to address this crucial problem. DOVIR includes mobile smartphone application together with cloud-based services to create a virtualized infrastructure for enabling precise, in-time food donation. We discuss the architecture of DOVIR, and several design considerations to ensure its practical viability.