A Monitoring System Of Cold Chain Logistics For Farm Produce

Recent years, the demand for fresh foods continues to increase and requirementof the quality of fresh foods becomes higher and higher. Due to the fact that theexisting domestic technologies applied for practically monitoring the cold-chain arefairly limited, the loss of the cold foods during the logistics is much higher than thatof international standards and the food safety accidents happen very often, Studiesshow that the key point of cold chain logistics’ quality control is a well-establishedtemperature monitoring system. However, the current situation and the greatestobstacle of the cold chain temperature monitoring are the failures of synchronoustemperature monitoring and data analysis, which is still in lack of a systematicresearch and solution.This article gives a new method of temperature monitoring system which basedon RFID, CMOS camera, MCU and GPRS technology. The system is divided intovehicle mobile terminal and data center. The vehicle mobile terminal consists of MCU,RFID reader-writer,CMOS camera, GPS receiver and GPRS module. In this design,we use RFID temperature tags and CMOS camera to collect the temperature data andimages of goods in refrigerated vehicles. The MCU controls GPRS module via ATcommands to send temperature data,images and vehicle location information gatheredfrom RFID reader,CMOS camera and GPS receiver to data center. The data centerconsists of receiving server and web applications. The receiving server is in charge ofreceiving information from GPRS modules, and storing the information into database.The web applications on web server will publish the information from database tointernet. Since the temperature of the food containers in logistics is a very importantparameter, the warning message will be automatically sent to the drivers and centrallycontrol office when the temperature exceeds a given threshold. The laboratory experiment results have shown that this system can be used to ensure that the goods intransit is always maintained in a safe condition, the loss of the foods during logisticscan be effectively reduced.