Harnessing Digital Twins for Building Resilient Food Supply Chains

The need to feed a population of ~10 billion by 2050 and growing concern of food wastage have collectively prompted diverse stakeholders, including producers, logistics companies, governments and food health enforcement bodies to explore various strategies for establishing robust food supply chains to ensure food availability and reduce wastage. In addition, food quality and safety are becoming critical from the consumer perspective. However, reducing food wastage while ensuring food availability, safety and quality is a challenging task due to the uneven demand patterns, unique perishability dynamics of the food, uncertain environmental factors and a wide range of supply chain complexities. Better demand forecasting, continuous monitoring of food throughout their life cycles, timely interventions, better storage and distribution systems and seamless movements of food throughout the supply chain network conforming to food characteristics are essential to achieve the desired objective of reducing food wastage while ensuring food availability, safety and quality. We adopted food digital twin (FDT) technology in combination with enterprise digital twin (EDT) to establish a resilient and sustainable food ecosystem addressing existing challenges. FDT, a multi-modal sensing and combined-physics- and AI-based model, helps monitor food condition and assess the remaining shelf life of food by considering its unique biochemical characteristics and degradation patterns. EDT, in contrast, is leveraged for supply chain specific to the unique characteristics of food. A seamless integrated use of both types of digital twins, i.e. FDT and EDT, ensures food safety and establishes a resilient and sustainable food supply chain to reduce food wastage and ensure food availability to the consumers without compromising on nutritional food value. This chapter discusses the challenges related to food safety and food supply chain, introduces the foundational concepts of FDT and EDT and illustrates our integrated approach using a case of post-harvest supply of fresh climacteric fruits and vegetables.