SmartAgriFood at IoT Week 2012

SmartAgriFood at IoT Week 2012 18-21 June 2012, Christopher Brewster and Tim Verwaart represented the SmartAgriFood project in the Internet of Things (IoT) Week event in Venice. The event had around 300 participants.We saw an interesting demonstration by Fraunhofer and SAP. It is relevant for the Smart Logistics use case. Fruit was packaged in RFID-tagged Europool crates. The crates are loaded onto tagged pallets or flight containers. Intelligent wireless sensors accompanied the fruit and recorded temperature and rough handling (abrupt movement). The sensors were connected to the driver’s smartphone, where the condition could be monitored. The sensors can alert the driver in case of inappropriate conditions. At the retail point, the information is transferred to the SAP system, where dynamic pricing is calculated using the sensor history as input. Another interesting project is EBBITS. They have a meat supply chain use case planned for the next year. It concerns tracking and tracing of meat (partitioning, repackaging, merging, etc.). One of the sessions was about the connection of Things in the cloud. The Japanese were talking about ubiquitous computing in the conference. All over Venice paintings of Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo, etc. were ubiquitous. The cloud has a prominent role in these painting, in particular in the ones covering the ceilings. Lots of Things were going on in those clouds: angels everywhere, but… no tomatoes in the cloud. That has to change. In the IoT Semantic Interoperability workshop, we introduced the concept of the virtual of tomato that collects data from sensors which reside in the actual tomato’s environment and can be queried by supply chain partners. The participants were impressed and amused by Christopher’s presentation (powerpoint attached).The elaboration of the IoT reference architecture in the IoT-A project is very relevant for SmartAgriFood architecture.