FRUIT FRESHNESS MONITORING SYSTEM DURING TRANSPORTATION -An RFID and WSN based Monitoring System

Abstract

In India, 104 million tons of perishable products such as fruits and vegetables are transported annually between Indian cities, out of which 100 million tons of products are transported in non-refrigerated mode. If the quality change of these products during transportation is not monitored, may incur economic loss or damage to fruits. There are many systems currently available in the literature for monitoring the perishable fruits using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and sensor technologies. However, these systems lack in providing a comprehensive approach taking under consideration of energy consumption and compliance with the temperatures needed to preserve foods. To overcome this issue, there is an emerging need to use and integrate the efficient technologies such as RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to monitor the ripening status of fruits for preventing the damage as well as to identify and track the exact presence of damage during transportation.
In this work, the ripening status of the fruits can be determined by the amount of ethylene content (fruit ripening hormone) it produces using sensors and RFID. The uniqueness of the proposed system lies in identifying the condition of fruits in each box using RFID tag with unique identifier. This helps in tracking the fruit box depending upon its ripening status without even opening it. For achieving an efficient real-time monitoring, control and management of fruit freshness during transportation, an integration of WSN and RFID based system interfaced with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been proposed in this work. This work aims to automate the fruit monitoring system by minimizing the system complexity and maintenance costs can be useful to suppliers with chain of warehouses, grocery retailers etc.