An Advanced Rapid Alert System for Food Safety

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 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 tradesâ 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.