Evaluation of the potential of emerging technologies for the improvement of seafood product traceability

Abstract

New and promising technologies are emerging at an accelerating rate. Their disruptive potential is significant, and they may have a considerable impact on our everyday life and on the socio-economic structures of our society. The use of these technologies may offer valuable solutions in multiple areas such as transportation, health care, energy production, food systems, supply chains or utilization of resources. There is a need to understand both the limitations and the potential advantages of these technologies before they disrupt every aspect of our lives. Authorities, academia, and the private sector show an increased interest in assessing the potential of these technologies in previously unexplored contexts. This thesis aims to explore in a structured way the potential of emerging technologies in the field of seafood product traceability. Functional traceability systems have the potential to ensure efficient and responsible production and sustainability of seafood resources, if implemented across entire supply chains. However, there are several risks and challenges of these systems that need to be addressed in order to maximise the potential of these systems (e.g. interoperability of systems, increased data collection and processing, trust and security issues). Due to the novelty of the topic investigated in this thesis, the nature of research chosen for the study is exploratory. The assessment of the potential of emerging technologies to improve traceability systems is based on inductive reasoning. The study uses secondary data about the two topics collected through an integrative review that also includes grey literature. The emerging technologies included for assessment are data driven; artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, extended reality, internet of things, digital twin, blockchain, 5G, quantum computing. After a comprehensive introduction of both traceability and traceability systems, and of the eight emerging data driven technologies, the thesis connects the two in a conceptual framework. Based on the analysis, the thesis suggests that there is considerable potential for these technologies to improve seafood product traceability. At this time, blockchain and the internet of things have the most substantial contribution to the domain of traceability. An important observation is that not a single technology is able to bring improvements by itself. There is a high interdependency between the technologies, meaning that ideally some of them would have to be implemented together in traceability systems in so called compositional architectures, which combine existing and emerging technologies in order to create best solutions. Transparent and trustworthy seafood product supply chains, improved data collection, increasing data processing capabilities, predictive algorithms, better decision making, reliable connection and virtualization of the product life cycle are just a few among the possible benefits of emerging data driven technologies in the new application domain of traceability. The results of this thesis can be used by several stakeholders in the seafood sector, among which: food business operators who are considering improving their traceability systems; authorities, associations, and organisations involved in the surveillance and monitoring of seafood supply chains; technology providers who are looking for new application domains.