Food Safety Alerts - A Case Study on an Advanced Rapid Alert System
Whisker T.Y. Law1 and Dickson K.W. Chiu1,2, Haiyang Hu3, Yi Zhuang4, Hua Hu3
1
Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon, Hong Kong
2
Dickson Computer Systems, 7 Victory Avenue, Homantin, Hong Kong, Senior Member, IEEE
3
Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, China
4
College of Computer Science & Information Engineering, Zhejiang Gongshang University, China
email: whiskermail@gmail.com, dicksonchiu@ieee.org, zhuang@zjgsu.edu.cn, {huhaiyang, huhua}@hdu.edu.cn
Abstract—Globalization of food production has increased the
possibility of public health incidents, involving food
contaminated with pathogens or chemicals. In recent years, food
poisoning and improper handling of food has caused food safety
incidents of international concern. Therefore, rapid access and
exchange of food safety alerts is crucial for maintaining food
trade and consumer confidence in the food supply. In this paper,
we introduce an Advanced Rapid Alert System (ARAS) to
effectively deliver food safety alerts in a timely manner with
structured information to identify affected trades related to
problematic food lots and prevent them from selling as soon as
possible. The ARAS requires information integration from
various government departments and public services through
Web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), such as
maintaining the databases of food lot, laboratory test results and
food trades’ information. The ARAS also interacts with the call
center through alert mechanisms to integrate incident reporting
processes. Moreover, smart phones act as ARAS clients to receive
alerts anytime anywhere. Our case study demonstrates the
effectiveness of information management through the use of
Web services, alerts, and mobile devices in our ARAS framework.
Keywords- food safety monitoring, alert management system,
web services, mobile agents, SOA, iPhone
I. INTRODUCTION
Problems of unsafe food keep increasing dramatically,
causing terrible diseases to human, ranging from diarrhea to
various forms of cancer. Globalization of food production is
one of the reasons for unsafe food distribution, as well as the
improper handling of food by different food trades.
Internationally, the World Health Organization (WHO) has
developed the International Food Safety Authorities Network
(INFOSAN) to promote food safety information exchange
among different countries and to improve collaboration
among different international food safety authorities and the
integration of their systems, such as the Rapid Alert System
for Food and Feed (RASFF) (Europa, 2011). In order to
interface with those sophisticated systems out there, an
efficient and structured food safety alert system shall also be
geared in Hong Kong in order to be brought in line with
international standards.
In Hong Kong, the Center for Food Safety (CFS) is a
leading food authority that commands the confidence of all
stakeholders in protecting the health of the people. CFS has
established the Food Surveillance Program to control and
prevent food hazards. Health inspectors of the Center take
samples at different point of food safety control, such as the
border control points, wholesalers and retail levels. With the
support of the Food Research Laboratory, microbiological
and chemical testing can be performed to the sample taken.
In case of any food safety problem found, CFS would
promulgate surveillance results for public information. It is a
three-tier approach to food surveillance consisting of routine
food surveillance, targeted food surveillance and seasonal
food surveillance. CFS started to pilot a Rapid Alert System
(RAS) in September 2007. RAS is able to send alert
messages by SMS, or a mass e-mail and fax system in order
to stop selling/recall concerned food products. CFS would
also issue press releases on their web site as well (CFS,
2011). However, fax, email, SMS may result in mis-
interpretation without structured information, the press
releases on web site are some belated information that is not
efficient, and there is no response mechanism to enforce the
concerned trades to take actions in timely manner. With this
uncontrollable mechanism, concerned trade couldn’t take
prompt action on food recalls, citizens of Hong Kong are
under the risk that unsafe food would continue to affect their
health in that prolonged period.
To solve the problems, this paper introduces an Advanced
Rapid Alert System (ARAS) on top of the existing RAS.
ARAS is designed based on an Alert Management System
(AMS) (Kafeza et al. 2004) implemented upon standard web
service technologies. ARAS can perform notification alerts,
recall orders to trades, and trades information retrieval with
the focus on timeliness of alert delivery. Moreover, mobile
technologies will also be used to increase the mobility of the
system, letting users to get the appropriate information
anywhere. This system is designed for Hong Kong to be
integrated to the existing Food Surveillance Program. After
this implementation, it will also make Hong Kong ready to
interface with other food safety authorities with structured
food safety information. ARAS can be integrated with
current manual processes for inspection and reporting and
facilitates communication across health organizations (e.g.
Department of Health (DH) , Hospital Authority (HA),
Center for Health Protection (CHP), laboratories), Trades
(e.g. retail, wholesaler) and personnel (e.g. health inspectors,
citizens). ARAS will also be able to automatically classify
incident severity, identify targeted alert group and define
structured service level requirement.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2
discusses the background and related work. Section 3
presents the system requirements and methodology. Section
4 presents our ARAS design and implementation with
architecture. Section 5 illustrates how the system works with
related walkthrough and prototypes. Section 6 presents the
applicability discussion and advantages of ARAS, and
Section 7 summarizes the paper with our future work
directions.
II. BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK
In our current environment, food regulations, Hazard
Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP), Good
Manufacturing Practice (GMP), or Good Hygiene Practice,
are targeted to guarantee a certain level of quality. Letia et al.
(2010) introduced the hazard ontology for supporting
HACCP in the food supply chain. Congguo et al. (2010)
developed a tracking and traceability system on pork quality
by applying RFID technology. However, since most of the
foods selling in Hong Kong are imported, applying HACCP
with food supply chain support does not give a big advantage
to the food safety in Hong Kong. On the other hand,
systematic and efficient food inspection processes is crucial
for imported food, and better equipped with proper food
safety alert system.
To make the existing RAS work, members of the
trade who wish to receive the rapid alert message
should enroll to the RAS by filling in an application
form and send to CFS in advance. Required
information includes the demographic of the trade such
as name of contact person, telephone number, email
address and fax number. Moreover, the applicant needs
to select the trade type from a predefined list.
Whenever there is a food safety problem, such as
the case of plasticizer in Taiwan, health inspectors at
the border control point would take samples from all
related food lot and send them to the Food Research
Laboratory. If the food lot is confirmed with problem,
the laboratory would contact CFS by phone or email.
CFS will then search for the trade type that is related to
that particular food lot, and then send the alert to them
by SMS, fax or email. There are several problems in
this workflow. Firstly, the laboratory ordering is slow
without a computerized process; the food lot
examination is delayed. Secondly, CFS send the alert
solely based on the trade type which required the
accuracy of those information, that means it depends
on the enrolment forms submitted by trades. If the
trade selected a wrong trade type, and the staff
responsible for checking the form overlooked it, the
concerned trade would never get the alert. Thirdly, the
alert is sent through fax or email may experience the
transmission problem or mis-interpretation problem. It
would result serious consequences to citizens’ health
that the alert is not properly received by the concerned
trade on time. Lastly, the alert is one way and does not
involve an acknowledgement from concerned trades so
that the recall of the problematic food lot cannot be
enforced.
There is no such thing called “successful recall”.
Any food recall means there is something bad
happening to a food lot that has the potential to harm
our citizens’ health. Therefore, we shall establish an
alert system to get food safety alerts as soon as possible
to mitigate the risk of food incident or food poisoning
outbreak. To achieve this goal, ARAS is required to
streamline cross-organizational services or processes
by creating an open and distributed system
environment. By using web services technology,
flexible service selection and composition for cross-
organizational processes can be enabled. With the
advance web services standards like the Universal
Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) and
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) (Newcomer et al,
2004), different computer systems can easily locate the
required services. As such, interoperable alert exchange
systems can be built. Additionally, Alert Management
System (AMS) will also be adopted when designing
ARAS, the disaster management system is one
example that using this (Chiu et al, 2009). If the
computer systems among laboratories, CFS, border
control points can be integrated, efficient transmission
of food inspection information can be achieved.
Moreover, with the state-of-the-art mobile devices (e.g.
iPhone), web services can be called anywhere and
anytime by using the SOA based middleware (Eichhorn
et al, 2010). When designing the ARAS, Unified
Modeling Language (UML) approach is used to model
web services (Lunn, 2002).
With the recent advance of mobile phone
technology, we started to combine the functionalities of
a mobile phone and the Portable Digital Assistant
(PDA) into one single device, that’s what we called
smart phone. “Apps” is a jargon on the Internet
nowadays to represent the idea of mobile application
used in smart phones. Operating systems and
applications keep popping out everyday (iPhone,
Android phone etc.). Eichhorn et al (2010) introduced a
SOA-based middleware concept to be integrated with
those smart phones in order to connect the mobile
applications with the web services and SOA
architecture at backend. The Device Profile for Web
Services (DPWS) and Human Machine Interface
(HMI) enabled the smart phones to call the web
services available at any place. According to
Wikipedia, “The DPWS defines a minimal set of
implementation constraints to enable secure web
service messaging, discovery, description, and eventing
on resource-constrained devices”.
Considering that ARAS shall deliver timely alerts,
the reliability of the system is highly concerned. On
system level, we may consider redundant power
supply, duplicate sets of hardware and software and
information caching. On network level, since ARAS
will be connected through Internet and mobile network,
the network performance may not be satisfactory in
most cases, so static network routing is considered not
applicable. We may consider the routing configuration
with “alternative path routing” (Pearlman et al., 2000)
that maintain a set of diverse path to ARAS. Mobile
devices can dynamically select the routing path that has
the best response. Moreover, the network accelerator
and load balancers can be deployed on server side to
increase the reliability of the system. They will be
discussed in this paper.
III. REQUIREMENTS & METHODOLOGY OVERVIE
The objectives of ARAS are to provide timely
notifications and request for recall. It can be done through
the Internet with the support of the mobile devices. The main
stakeholders are as follows:
International Food Safety Authorities – These food safety
authorities are responsible for different area. In country level
there is U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that is
responsible for protecting the public health of U.S. citizens
by assuring the safety of food (FDA, 2011). For Europa,
there is a Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF)
providing food and feed control authorities with an effective
tool to exchange information about measures taken
responding to serious risks detected in relation to food or
feed among their member states. (Europa, 2011). In the cross
country level, we have the World Health Organization
(WHO) that had established the International Food Safety
Authorities Network (INFOSAN) which is a joint initiative
between WHO and the Food and Agriculture Organization of
the United Nations (FAO). This a global network includes of
177 member states. Each has a designated INFOSAN
emergency contact point for communication between
national food safety authorities and the INFOSAN secretariat
regarding urgent events. Recognizing that food safety is
often a shared responsibility, countries are also asked to
identity focal points in other ministries or relevant agencies
to receive INFOSAN communications. All of these
authorities are trying to provide a platform for the easy
information exchange on food safety alerts. However, it still
requires the member states / countries to have a structured
food safety alert system and related information in order to
interface with them. Our ARAS will be served as the official
food safety alert system in Hong Kong to be integrated with
these authorities.
Food Importers– These importers are the main source of
food supplies for Hong Kong. They are responsible to ensure
the food safety of their goods. Every food lot to be imported
to Hong Kong is required to be randomly inspected at border
control points unless that food lot is certified by other food
safety authorities. The linkage among the importers,
wholesaler and retails may also be an issue of the traceability
of the food lot, but it’s not covered in this paper. The
wholesalers and retails are simply grouped as “Trades” as the
recipients of the alerts. In ARAS, food importers are also the
recipients of alerts through their information system in place
or the mobile application to be supplied by ARAS.
Company Registry in Hong Kong –The Company
Registry (CR) is responsible for providing services to
incorporate local companies. All company information
including Trades can be found in their database (Company
Registry, 2011). ARAS will retrieve company information to
be linked to the alerts. Recipients of an alert can get the
affected trades information easily. One of the prerequisites
for ARAS to work is that the information systems in CR
shall be equipped with proper programmatic interfaces which
are not yet available at this moment.
Food Research Laboratory –The Food Research
Laboratory has been set up within the Public Health
Laboratory Center (PHLC), which was completed in late
2001. The laboratory researches conducted will provide
scientific data for risk assessment and formulation of food
surveillance strategies. Any suspicious food lot will be sent
to the laboratory for microbiological testing includes bacteria
and viruses, and also the chemical testing includes food
additives, contaminants and natural toxins, etc. The testing
result will be generated and sent to CFS once confirmed.
However, the existing laboratory test ordering involved a lot
of manual processes that induces unnecessary turnaround
time. With the introduction of ARAS, we aim to order and
receive tests through Internet with the integration of their
Laboratory Information System (LIS). (Public Health
Laboratory Services Branch, 2011)
Mobile Individuals – These include consumers, Trades
(wholesaler and retail), health inspectors, doctors and
administrator. Enquiry of alerts is available for all mobile
individuals with their smart phone or other mobile device.
Health Inspectors and Trades have additional agent in their
smart phone to process the work flow of food recall while
consumers do not. Consumers, doctors in HA or DH can
report food safety problem. Administrator can monitor the
pending alerts and their responses. Health inspectors are also
responsible for any routine or ad hoc food inspection in
Hong Kong.
Food safety reporting call center –People can call the 24-
hour Hotline that is handled by the "1823 Call Center" of the
Government to make suggestions, enquiries, complaints, and
obtain information pamphlets and application forms etc.
Callers may also choose to listen to pre-recorded messages.
This centralized platform is provided for all stakeholders as a
single contact for the food safety problem reporting. The call
center can monitor the enquiry status and follow up between
the caller and the target party.
Hospital Authority(HA) –The Hospital Authority is a
statutory body established under the Hospital Authority
Ordinance in 1990. It is responsible for managing Hong
Kong's public hospitals and their services to our community.
Food incidents may sometimes reported during the diagnosis
of patients.
Department of Health (DH)–The Department of Health is
the health adviser of the Government of the Hong Kong
Special Administrative Region and an executive arm in
health legislation and policy. DH also operates government
clinics that is also one of the control point that food safety
problem can be found. Port Health Unit of DH is also
responsible for any health issues at border control point.
Center for Food Safety (CFS)– CFS is under Food and
Environmental Hygiene Department(FEHD). Its
Responsibilities include planning and overseeing the
implementation of a territory-wide food surveillance
program to ensure food is fit for human consumption; Food
import control and export certification; Management of all
food incidents, including investigation of food borne illness
outbreaks at food premises, management of food safety
crises and coordination of food recalls; Liaison with
international food authorities, food traders and other parties
to ensure effective food safety control; Formulation of
measures to prevent and control diseases originating in live
food animals which have a public health angle, including
liaison with the Mainland and overseas authorities;
Overseeing conduct of chemical tests at Man Kam To Food
Control Office on imported food from the Mainland. CFS is
the major stakeholder that centrally manages food safety in
Hong Kong.
Center for Health Protection (CHP)–CHP focuses on
expanding the disease surveillance network with the aid of
information technology, strengthening infection control,
enhancing laboratory diagnostic capacity, conducting risk
communication and health promotion, developing applied
research and training programs, and preparing emergency
response plans. Combating non-communicable diseases
(NCD) is also an important part of CHP's mission. The work
includes surveillance of NCD, as well as promotion of
healthy lifestyle and other initiatives aimed at encouraging
healthy living in the community. When food safety alerts
involve food poisoning or potential disease outbreak, CHP is
required to be notified ASAP in order to stop the crisis.
According to the requirements, ARAS requires timely
notification of information about the food safety alert and
carries out food recall ordering when necessary. Moreover,
the alert shall be delivered to appropriate stakeholders in an
accurate and efficient manner to prevent delay of the food
alerts promulgation and food recall process. To increase the
mobility of ARAS, the Internet together with smart phones is
the best combination, although PCs are still compatible to
ARAS for better coverage of our service. Therefore, ARAS
needs to consider the interoperability among different
systems and data format, which makes web service the best
choice to my knowledge.
The major functions of ARAS include the following: (1)
It shall provide structured database of food safety alerts, with
the extended interfaces to acquire the information related,
such as trades information, and food lot information that is
searchable by clients; (2) Provide agents in the backend
system and clients to enable automatic alerts retrieval based
on predefined filter; (3) On top of the alerts, food recall order
shall be enabled for designated stakeholder (e.g. health
inspectors, CFS) to request the concerned trade to take
action, with the acknowledgement mechanism to ensure the
order is enforced ; and (4) Exception handling if the recall
order is not enforced within a time limit and automatically
inform relevant stakeholders to take contingent actions.
Food Safety Management Processes and Workflows
ARAS Actions: Notification, Information Request,
Action Request to Trades
Alerts Managed by AMS
Web Services and Mobile Devices
Figure 1. The role of alerts in the ARAS
IV. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
Figure 2. SEMS Architecture highlighting the AMS
According to Chiu et al. (2009), the ARAS based on
AMS supports a stakeholder to be both a service provider
and a requester. Each stakeholder can use the AMS to both
submit and receive alerts. The Incoming Alert Monitor is
responsible for receiving and queuing alerts and enacting the
corresponding services (processes). Incoming alerts are
received as invocation of a web service, or information
retrieval via the Web Portal. They can trigger the execution
of the appropriate alert handlers in the application logic
through the Process Execution module. In addition, the
Process and Alert Definition module supports a tool with
which users may define the tasks and their associated alerts
according to their requirements.
The Outgoing Alert Monitor subsystem is responsible for
creating and submitting the alerts by means of Web services
requests to the corresponding stakeholder as well as
monitoring their responses. As for human service providers
(such as health inspectors and trades), alerts are delivered to
their mobile devices. The Outgoing Alert Monitor subsystem
consists of three modules: the Urgencies Strategy Definition,
the Role Matching, and the Service Provider Monitor
modules. The Role Matching module is responsible for
identifying the service providers to which the alert will be
forwarded. The Urgencies Strategy Definition module
specifies the policies that will be followed if the alert is not
acknowledged within the deadline. The Service Provider
Monitoring module is responsible for applying the strategies
thus defined. Its functions include sending alert messages,
receiving response, maintaining alert status, and logging
information.
 V. INFRASTRUCTURE AND ALERT MECHANISMS alert is originally reported by a hospital, the enquiry
information of that hospital is stored with the enquiry ID
linked to the Food safety alert class, so that the alert
recipients can contact the concerned stakeholder for further
enquiry regarding that particular alert. This model is just act
as a starting point to brainstorm the extended food safety
alert model, it’s flexible and allows any further extension.
Figure 7 depicts the typical alert life cycle. All processing
and messaging for a food safety alert are logged for auditing
purposes. If the alert is a specific one (e.g., when the process
requests enquiry with a specific official such as health
inspector), role matching is not required. If the alert is a
flexible one, a matching algorithm is invoked to search for
Data suitable service providers (e.g., select the concerned trades
Request generates
AMS 1
related to that particular alert). The “Determine device / web
Alert

Process
Task
0..*
service access point” node determines the device for a
generates
Request
1
human or the Web Service access point for a Web Services
provider respectively. And then, the alert is sent to
Specific Task Flexible Task
appropriate recipients accordingly. If the “Check if response
specify
require
received by deadline” node fails, the AMS will increase the
1
Service Provider
Capability
Profile
1..*
Role
alert urgency level according to the urgency level definition
send
1..*
send
in Figure 8.
1
0..1

Response
0..n
0..*

Web Service Human Sevice 1..* Schedule Devices

Provider Provider
* 1..*

Service Access Points

1..*

Figure 3. Alert conceptual model and extension

Figure 5 summarizes the design of an alert conceptual

model in a class diagram of the UML which fully adopted
the design proposed by Chiu et al (2009). Based on the
prevailing alert model, we have developed a bit on the
extended model of the alert content which explain the actual
alert information to be used and the linkage of different
sources of information. Food safety alert should not be
stored in a single class which is not flexible when designing
Figure 4. Typical alert life cycle
the system. As shown in figure 6, Food safety alerts should
contain trades information, food lot information and the
relevant enquiry information. A trade’s information is linked Urgent t  T (default)
with a Trade ID which is unique for each trade, with the
Very Urgen t T  t  T  dt1
interfaces to CR. The trade’s information class is further

expanded with the classification of different trade type. For U 001(t )  
example, separate class for Beef trades storing the name,
addresses, BR number etc. for each trade is stored in one Critical T  dt1  t  T  dt1  dt2
class, Dairy trades information are stored in another class.
The above design is to reduce the size of a single entity to
Very Critical T  dt1  dt2  t  T  dt1  dt2  dt3
improve the performance of the trade information retrieval.
For the food lot information, a food lot ID is assigned for Urgency Action Description
each food lot, a food lot should contain the food name, Level
ingredients, date of manufacturing etc. Manufacturer Urgent Default for non-food poisoning case
information is a separate class linked by a unique Very Urgent Submit a second alert to the same problematic
manufacturer ID, which storing the manufacturer’s name, trade / retail, notifying it about the approaching
address etc. The enquiry info class stores the enquiry deadline
information of the related food alert. For example, if the food
Critical Redirect the alert to health inspectors that is
immediately available to response and perform
direct site inspection, also copy to the same
trade / retail again
Very Critical Send the alert to all related trades / retail that
selling the same category of food; send alert to
CFS to instruct related health inspectors that is
immediately available to response and perform
direct site inspection; Food poisoning cases will
be assigned to this level by default
Figure 5. Urgency level escalation

Firstly, if the alert is for non-food poisoning case, it is

marked as “urgent” and then sends out the alert to concerned
trade, if there is no response received from specific trade
within a time limit, it will resend the alert and mark it as
“Very Urgent” to notifying it about the approaching deadline.
If the concerned trade still not response, the later urgency
will be raised to “Critical”, the alert will be sent to the
nearest heath inspectors that is immediately available to
perform direct site inspection, also copy to the concerned
trade again to let it know that the health inspectors are
coming over. If the case still not responded by recipients, it
will be raised to “Very Critical”, sending the alert to all
trades which are under the same trade type to take prompt
action like stop selling the specific type of food, CFS will
also be alerted to instruct health inspectors to take immediate
actions. Since food poisoning cases induce much higher
risks, they will be assigned to “Very Critical” by default.
VI. SYSTEM WALKTHROUGH & PROTOTYPES
In figure 9, the life cycle of a food safety alert at border
control point s proposed. When a food lot arrived at border,
the health inspectors will check if that food lot has safety
certificate from other food safety authorities (e.g. FDA). If Apart from the routine inspection of food lot, CFS is also
yes, the food is allowed to be imported without sampling. If responsible to handle the food safety reporting from different
no certificate provided, health inspectors will take samples stakeholders (e.g. consumers, DH, HA, doctors). For
from the food lot and send to the Food Research Laboratory example, when the call center received a call, the call center
for investigation. At this point, an alert will be sent to the personnel will first identify whether that is a food poisoning
laboratory by AMS with the food lot information, importer case. If it is a non-food poisoning case, the call center will
information, and manufacturer information, the concerned simply forward the case to CFS. CFS will then study the
food lot will be held in a staging area at border control point. case, if it is confirmed with food safety problem (may need
Once the laboratory result is ready, the LIS there will check verification from laboratory as well but we don’t bother
if that food lot is safe. If yes, an alert will be sent to the here), CFS will trigger to send alerts based on the similar
health inspectors at border control point to allow import. mechanism specified in figure 9 with the ARAS. If the call
Otherwise, an alert will be sent to CFS. CFS will then involves food poisoning case, it will be sent to the health
determine the target group of recipients for that alert through inspectors directly and the health inspectors will go to
the role matching module. There should be multiple alerts to concerned trades and take samples to laboratory for
be sent to different parties, the concerned trades, related investigation. If the problem cannot be found at the trades
health inspectors and other food safety authorities. The reported by call center, health inspectors will report to the
subsequent steps will follow the urgency level definition and call center and gather more information. Unless the case is
make sure the alert can get response by a service provider. If resolved, health inspectors will keep find other suspected
the response time does not meet target, separate alert will be trades to continue the inspection. If a food lot is found with
sent to administrator as well. All alerts are logged and food safety problem during inspection, health inspectors can
monitored by CFS. generate and alert with their mobile devices and send to CFS.
Subsequent workflow will be the same as other cases.
Although there are many smart phones out there, we have
chosen iPhone as the development environment of ARAS
because of the big and clear screen. Figure 14 shows the
enquiry page of ARAS. The user can select an alert from the
list or search other alerts by keywords. The functions are the
same as the one in web portal that provide food lot info,
trade info, and reporting function. Figure 15 shows the
function for reporting a new food safety case, user shall first
select the trade type, and then type in the details, and user
can also provide attachment. The case is in free text format
and will be forwarded to call center for further follow up.
The above functions are in active mode, which requires
the user to search, select and type. Other than those, trades
and health inspectors should have the mobile application
installed in their smart phone to receive alerts automatically
in a passive mode. Figure 16 shows a notification alert pop-
up, alert is retrieved by the mobile agent in the iPhone with
the POF enabled (Kwon, 2010). To reuse the existing
resources of RAS, the trades registered in RAS previously
can also receive the alerts for their trade type by applying the
account of ARAS.
VII. DISCUSSION
Based on the discussion in previous section and the
concept illustration with prototype, the design of the whole
system is already visualized. But ARAS is designed based on
web services technology, where is the web services details?
It may be another good research direction for us. Although
the web services are not listed in detail in this paper,
classification of the web services are defined beforehand to
assist the physical system design in the future. “Notification
alerts” is for the verification and identification of the food
safety problem (e.g. from laboratory to CFS, from trades to
CFS). “General information alerts” is for the inquiry of food
lot information such as country origin, batch numbers and
trades that selling the food lot. “Trades information alerts”
give information for a specific trade such as locations of their
factory and the retails. And the “Recall order alerts” deliver
recall instructions to involved trades.
With the implementation of ARAS, food safety
authorities can improve the existing problems that involved
unreliable and slow manual procedures, handle exceptions
that cannot be provided by email and fax and liaise with
variety of parties and personnel. With the AMS monitor that
can track alerts and take actions timely, the enforcement of
food recall order can be achieved easily. Health Inspectors
can improve food inspection processes with efficient alert
model, decision support by searching through a structured
database, increased mobility of the system can let the
inspectors to provide efficient food safety problem reporting.
Trades (wholesalers / retails) can receive alerts from mobile
devices and recall food lots immediately to prevent food
safety hazards. They can also have efficient enquiry on food
lots information and establish effective coordination with
Government. Citizens in Hong Kong can get them notified
(push mode) instead of just publishing the alerts on web sites
without proper search function (pull mode). ARAS also
improves communications between Government and citizen
by providing the web portal and mobile application for food
safety problem reporting. For the healthcare providers (e.g.
CHP, DH and HA), ARAS can get them notified with the
updated information of food safety problems, so that they
can make prior arrangement on their resources whenever
there is a food incident. These are the functions that ARAS
can provide to fit into the stakeholders’ requirements to a
modern food safety alerts system.
The reliable system deployment proposed in section 5.2
includes all the possible options including hardware and
software. However, the implementation of all those items
may be too expensive under a limited budget of the
Government. To tackle this problem, the deployment of the
system can be divided into phases. The first phase can be the
core infrastructure within the Internal ARAS and the
integration of call center, to quickly get the platform on stage
for the internal operation use. The second phase can be the
External ARAS after a period of smooth operation of Internal
ARAS, so that the budget can be acquired easier with the
already-showed achievement of Internal ARAS. The network
acceleration and load balancing measures are flexible to add
at any time after phase two, in case the performance of the
system is not satisfactory.
The advantages of ARAS includes (1) Integration and
automation of the current food safety reporting processes
(telephone, fax and email) to deliver timely alerts to all
stakeholders; (2) Increases the efficiency of the food recall
processes and store the food safety alerts in a structured way
for easy retrieval ; (3) Web Services technology provides the
underlying open platform for integration, (4) Mobile
application increase the mobility of the system and
stakeholders can receive alerts “anytime, anywhere” and (5)
Reliable infrastructure to make the system “always on”.
VIII. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have presented an ARAS
architecture, which supports alert notification and food
recall order in the event of a food safety problem.
ARAS deployment segregates the environment into
Internal ARAS, External ARAS and the call center
which can provide reliable service to stakeholders. The
whole system relies on AMS which supports
communications of both human and web services.
Moreover, mobile application with mobile agents is
also introduced to enable remote access from anywhere
with the support of MAIS. Therefore, this architecture
provides a high mobility, reliable and efficient way to
deal with the food safety alerts among different
stakeholders. Furthermore, with the support of web
services, the integration process is easy because of the
interoperability.
In summary, ARAS supports alert notification and
enquiry service in the event of a food safety problem.
Separated infrastructure for Government officials and
other stakeholders is designed to balance the workload
of the system and provide high availability in case of
system breakdown. AMS is adopted for ARAS for the
coordination of various functions or tasks at various
stages of a food safety alert, including detection,
notification, remedy, and recovery. ARAS can be built
with mobility and stability to various stakeholders to be
connected from different places and form an efficient
communication network. Most importantly, we have
the food safety information manipulation and process
management improved. Food safety problem cannot be
avoided, but can be mitigated.
As for future work, we plan to explore more on the
urgency tables to further classify the problems to meet
the business needs. Mobile application interoperability
study is another concern because of the exploding of
mobile technologies with different application platform
and operating systems (e.g. iPhone / Android). We will
also study the deployment strategies of the system for
trades with their limited computer knowledge.
Moreover, handling the enforcement of food recall
processes is another research area since the failure of
commitments from trades in relation to food recall
which can only be controlled by human processes for
now. With the domain knowledge from healthcare
industry, ARAS may also be enhanced to evaluate the
impact of failure of food recalls based on the nature of
food contamination. We may also study how to
integrate the call center to other food safety authorities’
reporting network (e.g. INFOSAN from Word Health
Organization (WHO)). Finally, we will research for the
measures to further increase the system reliability and
security, such as redundant hardware, duplicate
connection links and nodes, powerful firewalls and
intrusion prevention systems to prevent denial of
service to the system.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This paper is supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 60873022 and
60903053, the Open Fund provided by State Key Laboratory
for Novel Software Technology of Nanjing University, and
the Key Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province of
China under Grant No.Z1100822.
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