The role of internet of things in food supply chain quality management: A review

Abstract

In their review of internet of things (IoT) applications in supply chain management, Ben-Daya et al. identified the food supply chain (FSC) as one of the application areas with greatest potential for reaping the benefits of IoT. In this paper, we focus on the FSC, conduct a literature review, and carry out a bibliometric analysis in order to better understand the potential, challenges and role of IoT and other enabling technologies such as blockchain on FSC quality management. Most of the literature focuses on the technology aspects in providing solutions to FSC challenges. The review also indicates that the literature dealing with models and decision support systems that make use of IoT data to enhance the decision-making process is limited. This is clear from the limited number of publications in operations management and related journals that usually deal with these issues. Based on the findings of this literature review, we provide possible research topics that take advantage of the rapid technological advances in the area of FSC.

Keywords:

• Food supply chain
• internet of things
• supply chain quality management

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their excellent feedback that has significantly improved the paper. In particular, Section “Discussion and future research directions” has benefited a lot from the reviewers' comments and suggestions.

Additional information

Funding

Funded by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and American University of Sharjah.

Notes on contributors

Mohamed Ben-Daya

Mohamed Ben-Daya is a Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at the American University of Sharjah. He received his MS in Operations Research and PhD in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. His research interests are in the areas of production planning and scheduling, maintenance and quality control, and supply chain management. He teaches course in the areas of facilities planning, Production and inventory control, scheduling, Quality control, Maintenance and reliability engineering and supply chain management.

He published over ninety papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings. He co-edited several books and coauthored a textbook on maintenance engineering published by Wiley. He is the cofounder and associate editor of the Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering published by Emerald, UK and Associate Editor of INFOR: Information Systems and Operational Research.

Elkafi Hassini

Elkafi Hassini is a Professor and chair of Operations Management at the DeGroote School of Business, and associate member of the School of Computational Science & Engineering in McMaster University. He received his PhD in Management Sciences from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Among his current research projects are big data optimization is supply chains and last mile freight distribution and warehouse management.

He has published extensively in the areas of operations research and supply chain management. He currently serves as a co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal INFOR: Information Systems and Operational Research, the flagship journal of the Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS).

Zied Bahroun

Zied Bahroun is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at the American University of Sharjah (UAE). He received the B.Sc. degree in Industrial Engineering in 1994 from the National school of Engineering of Tunis. He then completed his master degree in computer science in 1996 at the Faculty of Sciences of Tunis (University of Tunis El Manar, Tunisia). He then obtained his PhD degree from the University of Franche-Comté (France) in automatic control and computer science in 2000.

His research interests include multi-objective optimization, evolutionary computation, supply chain management, ERP systems, production and inventory control, applied operations research, scheduling in manufacturing and healthcare, simulation, stochastic processes, Industry 4.0 and internet of things applications in supply chains.

Bayan H. Banimfreg

Bayan H. Banimfreg received the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan, in 2010 and the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, USA, in 2014. She also has master in business administration from Webster University, Missouri, USA, in 2016. She is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in engineering systems management at American university of Sharjah, Engineering College, Sharjah, UAE. Her research interests include big data analytics, and smart data mining applications in healthcare related fields.