BIGcoldTRUCKS: a BIG data dashboard for the management of COLD chain logistics in refrigerated TRUCKS

The technological development of the food industry is bringing new opportunities for the optimization of cold chain logistics. Many businesses of all sizes have been capturing their trips' data and they are ready to apply Big Data analytics and use Big Data tools in order to extract knowledge and patterns that can be useful for decision-making and therefore provide added value to their business. In this line, we developed a shiny dynamic dashboard that provides a friendly user interface to the business in order to visualize and understand their data in the form of rankings, trips duration, demand seasonality, and geographic representation of the trips. The dashboard connects seamlessly with two Big Data tools, elasticSearch and the DEEP training facility from the European Open Science Hub (EOSC). More specifically, those tools were used for data indexing and demand estimation of products using cloud computing respectively. Thanks to the interconnection of these tools, we are able to enhance the dynamic dashboard with Big Data Analytics in the form of multivariate demand prediction of the products using a Long Short Term Memory Network and ease query time and computation, creating real value for the cold chain logistics industry. The development of this solution was done with the support of the EOSC-Digital Innovation Hub initiative through a business pilot. The dashboard functionalities were implemented using a real-case dataset which cannot be shown for privacy reasons. In its place, we have simulated a meat-based products database for the purpose of this paper.