The performance of a supply chain depends critically on the coordinating actions and decisions undertaken by the trading partners. The sharing of product and process information plays a central role in the coordination and is a key driver for the success of the supply chain. In this paper we propose the concept of \Linked pedigrees" - linked datasets, that enable the sharing of traceability information of products as they move along the supply chain. We present a distributed and decentralised, linked data driven architecture that consumes real time supply chain linked data to generate linked pedigrees. We then present a communication protocol to enable the exchange of linked pedigrees among trading partners. We exemplify the utility of linked pedigrees by illustrating examples from the perishable goods logistics supply chain.
The notion of visibility in supply chains can be summarised as \Visibility is the ability to know exactly where things are at any point in time, or where they have been, and why"1. Critical to achieving visibility in the end-to-end supply chain is collaboration between trading partners2, usually facilitated by the sharing of information through their IT infrastructures. The performance of the supply chain and consequently the success or failure of trading partner businesses largely depends on the ease and timeliness with which real-time process and product knowledge can be shared and utilised in decision making.
End-to-end visibility requires integrated infrastructures and alignment of supply chain processes that streamline the exchange of data and knowledge. However, an analysis of existing procedures reveal that data and information ow along the supply chain is highly restricted and extremely complex. This is compounded by a very conservative \need-to-know" attitude such that essentially information ows only \one-up, one down". There is an urgent need for information and knowledge to be interlinked, shared and made available consistently along the supply chains not least for regulatory reasons but also due to increasing consumer demands of being able to track and trace commodities. 1 http://www.gs1.org/docs/GS1 SupplyChainVisibility WhitePaper.pdf. 2 We use the terms trading partners, actors and stakeholders interchangeably.
Two speci c supply chain domains, where lack of an information model that facilitates the exchange of end-to-end supply chain knowledge has been recognised as a critical issue for a long time are the agri-food sector and the pharmaceuticals industry. In agri-food supply chains, importance is given to tracking and tracing of foods in the context of health and safety and in order to both prevent and respond to food emergencies (mad cow disease, and most recently E. Coli). Another major factor is the growing desire on the part of food consumers to know more about their food. Healthcare on the other hand, requires an added element of visibility, which is the capability to capture and document the chain of custody and chain of ownership of a pharmaceutical product as it moves through the supply chain.
In this paper we present a distributed and decentralised framework for the real time tracking and tracing of goods, powered by Semantic Web standards and linked data principles. We propose the concept of \Linked pedigrees" - linked datasets curated by consuming real time supply chain linked data, that enable the capture of a variety of tracking and tracing information about products as they move among the various trading partners. Linked pedigrees overcome a signi cant limitation prevalent in conventional pedigree exchange - that of information being available only from partners one-up or one-down in the supply chain. Deferencing URIs make it possible to sequentially traverse the chain of pedigrees exchanged between partners and retrieve traceability information, given that adequate access control mechanisms are in place.
We present \OntoPedigree", an ontology design pattern for the data modelling of these \pedigrees", that can be specialised and extended to de ne domain speci c or indeed product speci c pedigree ontologies. We illustrate how EPCIS(Electronic Product Code Information Services)3 governing supply chain events can be exploited to generate linked pedigrees. Throughout the paper, we exemplify the utility of linked pedigrees by providing motivating examples from the perishable goods and logistics supply chain.
The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 discusses background and related work. Section 3 presents the concept of Linked Pedigrees , the content ontology design pattern \OntoPedigree" and a brief summary on how linked pedigrees are generated using EPCIS event data. Section 4 discusses our proposed linked data architecture with reference to the agri-food supply chain. Section 5 presents the linked pedigree communication protocol. Section 6 illustrates a motivating scenario from the perishable goods logistics supply chain. Finally, Section 7 presents conclusions and future work. 2
Conventionally, pedigrees can be paper based or documents exchanged electronically (e-pedigree). The use of pedigrees for tracking and tracing commodities 3 http://www.gs1.org/gsmp/kc/epcglobal/epcis is most widely prevalent in the pharmaceutical industry4. Pedigree or electronic pedigree (e-pedigree) is an audit trail that records the path and ownership of a drug as it moves through the supply chain, in which each stakeholder involved in the manufacture or distribution of the drug adds to the pedigree. The Pedigree standard5, rati ed by EPCglobal, provides an XML schema for the description of the life history of a product across arbitrary supply chains. Recently the concept of \Event based Pedigree"6 has been proposed that utilises EPCglobal's EPCIS speci cation for capturing events in the supply chain and generating pedigrees based on a relevant subset of the captured events. The generation of linked pedigrees as presented in this paper, builds on the event based pedigree approach.
Content ontology (CP) design patterns [
Supply chain information visibility has also received signi cant attention in
recent years [
As highlighted earlier in Section 2, a pedigree is a record that traces the ownership and transactions of a product as it moves among various trading partners. Analogous to the notion of pedigree, in this paper, we propose the concept of \linked pedigrees".
A linked pedigree is a dataset, identi ed using an http URI, described and accessed using linked data principles and represented using the RDF data model. Linked pedigrees encapsulate the knowledge required to trace and track products in the supply chain on a Web scale as well as capture a variety of other types of relevant data. They provide a domain independent data model for the sharing of knowledge among Semantic Web enabled systems deployed for the 4 http://www.axway.com/products-solutions/b2b/life-sciences-solutions/ epedigree 5 http://www.gs1.org/gsmp/kc/epcglobal/pedigree 6 http://www.gs1.org/docs/healthcare/Healthcare Traceability Pedigree Background.pdf 7 http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki/Submissions:ContentOPs 8 http://www.cassandra-project.eu/ tracking, tracing and data capture concerning commodities as they physically ow downstream or upstream in the supply chain, something which is currently severely limited in the agri-food sector.
The de nition of a linked pedigree includes URIs for product, transaction and consignment information curated in the trading partner's knowledge base. Additionally, apart from the pedigree initiated and created by the rst partner in the supply chain, e.g., the farmer in the agri-food sector, all other linked pedigrees include URIs to the pedigree datasets for the stakeholders in the immediate upstream or downstream of the supply chain.
We propose a content ontology design pattern \OntoPedigree" that can be incorporated while building domain speci c pedigree ontologies. OntoPedigree9 provides a minimalistic abstraction, that de nes conceptual entities for the modelling of knowledge required to enhance data visibility in a supply chain. The pattern can be specialised to de ne domain speci c pedigrees.
The pattern aims to provide answers to the following competency questions: { Who is the creator of the pedigree ? { What is the supply chain creation status of a given pedigree? { Which are the business transactions recorded against a particular consignment? { Which products have been shipped together? { Which other pedigrees are included in the received pedigree?
EPCIS event data arises during supply chain business processes when product movement information needs to be captured and shared among trading partners. Each EPCIS event, recorded and registered against RFID/barcode tagged artifacts has four information dimensions. It encapsulate the \what", \when", \where" and \why" of these artifacts at the RFID/barcode scan point. Event data grows over time and for any given supply chain process, a large number 9 http://purl.org/FIspace/pedigree# of events are recorded at each trading partner's end, a subset of which can be consumed and harnessed to generate linked pedigrees.
Based on the EPCIS speci cation, we have developed an OWL DL ontology, EEM 10 - the EPCIS event model. We have implemented the LinkedEPCIS Java library 11 for capturing EPCIS events as linked data. The type hierarchy in LinkedEPCIS is based on the entities de ned in the EEM data model. Every event curated in our event data triple store, using the library, is systematically assigned an HTTP URI. An important component of the library is the \LinkedPedigreeGenerator" which automates the generation of linked pedigrees by querying the triple store for event URIs corresponding to the commissioning, shipping, receiving and transaction events12. Additionally, URIs for the product master data, made available as linked data are retrieved. Consignment information is populated with spatial data for locations from DBpedia and Geonames.
The pedigree status is dynamically set, based on the point at which the pedigree is generated. Table 1 highlights how various elements of the linked pedigree are populated. 10 http://purl.org/FIspace/eem# 11 http://code.google.com/p/linked-epcis/ 12 The interested reader is referred to the EPCIS standard for further details We propose an open, scalable and decentralised architecture for enabling real time data visibility in supply chains. We assume that information management systems with dedicated Web service interfaces are in place for the capture and visualisation of the integrated information. Every actor in the supply chain manages its own datastore, i.e., there is no central repository for holding integrated datasets. We also assume that the services are equipped with interfaces through which semantically enriched queries, e.g., SPARQL queries can be executed and results can be obtained in one or more of the several standard formats such as RDF/XML, Turtle, JSON or JSON-LD. Visual Web interfaces that hide the complexity of SPARQL queries for the more general user may also be available.
Linked pedigrees can be obtained via a push model, i.e., an upstream actor sends the URI of the pedigree to a downstream actor or a pull model, i.e., a downstream actor requests pedigree information from an upstream actor. In this paper we assume a pull model for retrieving pedigrees. The high level architecture as exempli ed for the agri-food supply chain is illustrated in Figure 2. Shared data models, vocabularies, Web based and mobile application components are provided as cloud based services. Below we provide an account of key components comprising the architecture: { Linked Pedigree Manager agent: The pedigree manager agent is the central component that interfaces between the EPCIS event store and external systems. Some of the responsibilities of the agent include:
RESTfully query linked pedigrees from upstream/downstream stakeholders and locally corroborate electronic information recorded on received physical goods against the query results. Besides the pedigree being checked against the goods received or sent by supply chain partners, inspection/checking of pedigrees may be routinely undertaken by third parties. The manager agent is responsible for mediating between pedigree checking requests and event data held in the event store.
On receiving a request to provide a pedigree against a consignment of physical goods, generate the pedigree on the y from the knowledge curated in the event data stores of the stakeholder, assign it a URI and include outgoing links to external datasets. Pedigrees may also be curated by the agent before goods are shipped. { knowledge services: The management, update, query and access of the knowledge repository is facilitated via a set of Web services with RESTful interfaces. Besides these functionalities, the service suite provides standalone components or \apps" that can be integrated within the IT infrastructure for individual stakeholders. Examples include components implementing access control, dataset interlinking middleware services and dataset metadata (VOID13) stores. { Integrated Linked pedigree store: The integrated linked pedigree store provides an overarching, governing service, thereby giving an end-to-end context to the pedigree transactions taking place within individual supply chains. It can be observed in Figure 2 that the architecture is decentralised, i.e., there is no central datastore. The pedigrees in their de nition include the URIs of the pedigree received from the upstream or downstream stakeholders. Linked pedigrees can be sequentially traversed, to eventually construct an ordered chain of pedigrees in the supply chain, by dereferencing the URI corresponding to the hasReceivedPedigree relationship for every actor. However access control restrictions mean that it may not be possible for stakeholders themselves to obtain complete information related to products and consignments from every other stakeholder. The integrated linked pedigree store mitigates this limitation, should the need arise, by acting as the governing authority and providing a service that can facilitate the endto-end dereferencing of linked pedigrees in the supply chain. Additionally, 13 http://vocab.deri.ie/void the store can provide validation services for establishing the conformance of the information recorded on received physical goods against the results returned by querying the received pedigree URI, should a stakeholder agent not be available or equipped to perform the validation. 5
A note on privacy, access control and non repudiation The decentralised nature of the architecture and the message oriented communication protocol make security and privacy important considerations. Due to the inherent nature of tracking and tracing data being commercially sensitive, it is assumed message exchange will be appropriately secured via digital signatures and deferencing of pedigree URIs and event data URIs corresponding to various elements of a pedigree will be controlled via access controlled restrictions. We do not address these issues further in the paper. 6
The lifecycle of perishable goods e.g., tomatoes in the agri-food sector, is a complex process until they reach the end consumer because of the number of involved stakeholders and the diverse set of data that is produced. The tomato supply chain involves thousands of farmers, hundreds of traders and few retail groups. Figure 4 shows a generalised food chain scenario with a reduced level of complexity. This scenario covers 90% of the supply scenarios for fresh food products.
The general work ow involving the capturing of events, generation of linked pedigrees and exchange of pedigrees related to the sale of tomatoes between stakeholders such as the farmer (Franz), the trader (Joe), the distribution centre (FreshFoods Inc) and the supermarket (Orchard) is outlined below. We assume that all supply chain trading partners have an EPCIS implementation installed that exploits the LinkedEPCIS library for capturing and querying event and pedigree datasets.
{ Franz farmer specialises in growing tomatoes. The packaging of tomatoes is done in punnets, each of which are tagged with RFID labels. Shipment of tomatoes to downstream partners is done in cardboard boxes each of which is tagged with a RFID label. { Joe trader bundles tomatoes procured from multiple farmers to larger product batches before dispatching them to distribution centres. { Freshfoods Inc. sources tomatoes from multiple traders and splits up large product batches to smaller batches for distribution to retail supermarkets. { Orchards is a supermarket that receives fresh produce from distribution centres such as Freshfoods Inc.
As highlighted in Section 5, traceability data is commercially sensitive, Most trading partners are wary of sharing it outside their B2B setup. Due to the above constraint, we are unable to reproduce the actual real-time event data in this paper. We ran a simulation of the scenario, implemented using the EPCIS library, that generated the events and the pedigrees linked datasets, which were curated in the OWLIM 5.3 triple store. The simulation was in alignment with the real-time processes and is presented below.
Joe trader requests pedigree information on an identi ed tomato batch that
has been delivered to him by Franz farmer. The request is made by RESTfully
invoking Franz farmer's agent which is part of the FMS (farm management
system) installed at Franz farmer's end [
FranzTomatoFarmerPedigree123 fsc:FranzTomatoFarmerPedigree123 rdf:type ped:Pedigree; ped:hasSerialNumber "tomPed123"^^xsd:String; ped:hasStatus ped:Initial; ped:hasConsignmentInfo fci:FranzFarmerObjectEvent10,
fci:FranzFarmerAggregationEvent6; ped:hasTransactionInfo fti:FranzFarmerShippingEvent12;; ped:hasProductInfo ftp:FranzTomatoesMay2013Data.
Joe trader combines the tomato produce received from Franz with those received from other farmers (e.g., Bob) into shipments which are then forwarded to Freshfood Inc. On receiving a pedigree request from Feshfood Inc, Joe trader's agent sends the pedigree which includes URIs to the pedigree provided by Franz farmer and Bob farmer. The pedigree information provided by Joe trader for the shipment and retrieved by Freshfoods Inc. is illustrated below: ### http://fispace.aston.ac.uk/joetrader/
pedigrees/JoeTomatoTraderPedigree456 jsc:JoeTomatoTraderPedigree456 rdf:type ped:Pedigree ped:hasSerialNumber "joeTradePed456"^^xsd:String; ped:hasStatus ped:Intermediate; ped:hasConsignmentInfo jci:JoeTraderObjectEvent20,
jci:JoeTraderObjectEvent30; ped:hasTransactionInfo jti:JoeTraderTransactionEvent40; ped:hasProductInfo jpi:JoeTradesMay2013Info. ped:hasReceivedPedigree fsc:FranzTomatoFarmerPedigree123,
bsc:BobTomatoFarmerPedigree123.
The signi cant advantage of exchanging traceability information using linked pedigrees over conventional mechanisms is that the pedigree received by FreshFood Inc. from Joe trader includes URIs to pedigree datasets provided by Franz farmer and Bob farmer, even though they are not FreshFood Inc's one-up or onedown partners. Consuming EPCIS event data curated as linked data to generate and exchange linked pedigrees as outlined above can help derive implicit knowledge that can expose ine ciencies such as shipment delay, inventory shrinkage and out-of-stock situations. 7
Data visibility in supply chains has received considerable attention in recent years. Information systems are now being designed to facilitate the process of making data available in real time to stakeholders in the supply chain, while keeping access control restrictions in place. In this paper we have shown how Semantic Web standards, ontologies and linked data can be utilised to curate and represent real time supply chain knowledge, thereby signi cantly contributing to the vision. We have introduced the concept of \linked pedigrees" within the framework of an open, scalable and decentralised architecture. We have proposed a design pattern \OntoPedigree" that provides a minimalistic abstraction for designing domain speci c pedigree ontologies. Finally, we have presented a linked pedigrees communication protocol and an exemplifying usecase from the perishable food logistics domain. It is worth noting that our approach is domain independent and can be widely applied to most scenarios of traceability.
Distributed and decentralised systems have been the focus of research for the last few decades. There are several issues such as trust relationship between actors, access control mechanisms and performance optimisation that need to be considered. In this paper we have abstracted from those issues. Our aim was to show the relevance of consuming supply chain event data to the problem of real time tracking and tracking in supply chains.
While we strongly believe that linked pedigrees can make a signi cant di erence to current visibility approaches in supply chains, much work still needs to be done. As part of our future work we are investigating the use of rule based reasoning to enable real-time checking of pedigrees and identify problems such as \dwell-time consistency" before shipment are sent out or received. We are also re ning our event model to enable optimised query retrieval over large event datasets.
The research described in this paper has been partially supported by the EU FP7 FI PPP projects, SmartAgriFood (http://smartagrifood.eu) and FISpace http://www. fispace.eu/