The food supply chain, following its globalization, has become very complex. Such complexities, introduce factors that influence adversely the quality of intermediate and final products. Strict constraints regarding parameters such as maintenance temperatures and transportation times must be respected in order to ensure top quality and reduce to a minimum the detrimental effects to public health. This is a multi-factorial endeavor and all of the involved stakeholders must accept and manage the logistics burden to achieve the best possible results. However, such burden comes together with additional complexities and costs regarding data storage, business process management and company specific standard operating procedures and as such, automated methods must be devised to reduce the impact of such intrusive operations. For the above reasons, in this paper we present BioTrak: a platform capable of registering and visualizing the whole chain of transformation and transportation processes including the monitoring of cold chain logistics of food ingredients starting from the raw material producers until the final product arrives to the end-consumer. The platform includes Business Process Modelling methods to aid food supply chain stakeholders to optimize their processes and also integrates a blockchain for guaranteeing the integrity, transparency and accountability of the data.

翻译：食品供应链在全球化后变得极为复杂。这种复杂性引入了对中间产物及最终产品质量产生不利影响的因素。为确保最优品质并将对公共健康的危害降至最低，必须严格遵守诸如维持温度及运输时间等参数的严格约束。这是一项多因素协同的工作，所有相关利益方必须接受并管理物流负担，以实现最佳效果。然而，这种负担伴随着数据存储、业务流程管理以及公司特定标准操作程序方面额外的复杂性和成本，因此必须设计自动化方法来减少此类侵入性操作的影响。基于上述原因，本文提出了BioTrak：一个能够记录并可视化整个加工与运输流程链的平台，包括从原料生产商到最终产品送达消费者手中的冷链物流监控。该平台采用业务流程建模方法，帮助食品供应链利益相关者优化其流程，并集成了区块链技术，以确保数据的完整性、透明性和可问责性。