Prototype traceability system for the dairy industry.

摘要

At the beginning of the milk manufacturing process, a refrigerated bulk tank lorry is in charge of collecting milk from dairy farms in the area within a few hours. In this process, a milk sample is also collected at every farm. At the end of the collection the milk contained in the tank is analyzed. The problems appear when the analysis reveals the presence of forbidden substances at levels above stated thresholds in the milk tank but not in any of the samples; this is mainly due to the extremely low levels that are being considered for some substances and the way in which they rapidly deteriorate at high temperatures. Therefore, all samples must be kept in optimum-temperature controlled-conditions during transportation to ensure reliable results in the laboratory. In this paper, a novelty solution for the tracking and tracing of milk samples is presented. This solution includes a customized and automated cooler for carrying samples, a smart sensor inside the cooler saving the data collected during the process, and an USB sticker to transfer the collected data to a computer for further analysis. Several technologies have been combined to register and trace milk samples on their trip from farm to laboratory: microcontrollers, sensors, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), and Global Positioning System (GPS). Hardware and software prototypes have been successfully developed and tested in real vehicle case studies.