Patterns and technologies for enabling supply chain traceability through collaborative e-business

Industrial traceability systems are designed to operate over complex supply chains, with a large and dynamic group of participants. These systems need to agree on processing and marketing of goods, information management, responsibility, and identification. In addition, they should guarantee context independence, scalability, and interoperability. In this paper, we first discuss the main issues emerging at different abstraction levels in developing traceability systems. Second, we introduce a data model for traceability and a set of suitable patterns to encode generic traceability semantics. Then, we discuss suitable technological standards to define, register, and enable business collaborations. Finally, we show a practical implementation of a traceability system through a real world experience on food supply chains. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.