Wireless Sensor Network and On-line Shelf-Life Prediction in Perishable Goods Supply Chain through First-Order Kinetic Model

The pursuit of new tools for monitoring the quality level of any kind of perishable product, in particular food, along all the supply chain, answers to the demand of reducing losses and waste and thus guaranteeing both customers’ safety and satisfaction and vendors’ interests. The combination of sensors with the wireless network technology offers an effective solution for facing this challenge. This paper describes a wireless sensor network (WSN) for the continuous monitoring of the environmental parameters (i.e. temperature, light exposition and relative humidity) of a warehouse for agricultural products storage. Moreover, the collected data are processed for evaluating products level of quality, represented by the shelf-life parameter, through a computation algorithm based on a first-order model of decay process where the decay rate is evaluated accordingly with Arrhenius Law.