Development and evaluation of an intelligent traceability system for waterless live fish transportation
Introduction
Live aquatic products marketing is regarded as value-adding processes because live aquatic products obtain substantially higher prices, lower processing costs and the minimal governmental regulations compared with fresh chilled or frozen product. In China, consumers prefer to purchase fish that have only recently been killed, because in Chinese culture freshly killed fish is believed to bring vigorous to the body and has a delicious flavor than dead fish. It is indicated the live fish sales have rapidly expanded and were estimated to be 140 million tons at the 2016 year in China, also proves that live aquatic product sales price is 5–10 times higher than chilled and frozen aquatic products (Ghughuskar, 2004, Piedrahita, 2000, Selset, 2015, Tomasso, 1988, Walters, 1994).
There are two conventional live fish transport strategy - namely closed containers and open containers delivery (Mccarthy, 1982, Mishra, 2015). The closed container is a sealed equipment in which all the requirements for survival are the self-contained and life-supported system. The open system consists of water-filled containers in which the necessary conditions for survival is supplied continuously from outside facilities. However, fish transportation systems by water come at a high price and energy consumption due to the cost of water weight freight, temperature, oxygenation or aeration maintaining (Pérez, 2015). The use of cold as an anesthetic in fish waterless transportation is considered as a green transport strategy since this not only increase stocking density, but also it reduces metabolism and oxygen consumption (Zhang, Fu, Xiao, Zhang, & Li, 2017a). If low temperature is to be used as an anesthetic condition during the waterless live fish transportation, special considerations are required. On the one hand, maintenance of temperatures within a suitable range would be a precise quality control measure during the long-distance delivery. On the other, the oxygen concentration, as well as carbon dioxide accumulation, are needed to be focused on during the whole transport and gradual recovery stages after waterless delivery. It is believed that the solution of oxygen content problems—an adequate oxygen supply—would be essential to the development of an efficient waterless transport strategy (Zhang, Zhang, Nga, Liufeng, & Yu, 2018). Recent researches illustrate the technology can eliminate the use of water which consists of 75% of the weight (Mi et al., 2012, Salin, 2005). This green delivery strategy (Samet et al., 1996, Zeng et al., 2014) may improve the survival result with minimum stress changes and prevent stiffening for better meat quality, which is widely used in the live delivery for fish, shrimp, crab, and shellfish.
Although waterless transportation is considered to have the advantages of high volume of transportation and low carbon, HACCP process control is still lack of research. Live fish delivery involves capture, loading, transport, unloading and temporary culture, which can induce large stress responses for lack of oxygen, vibration, suboptimal temperature (Harmon, 2009, Manguya-Lusega, 2011, Reed, 2003). Although, live fish in a dormant state suffer no shock and have little likelihood of suffering stress (Balamurugan et al., 2016, Tacchi et al., 2015). High mortality rates and relatively short survival times are the main issues of the problems with live fish transportation. In summary, in every stage of live transportation, HACCP process control will reduce the potential hazardous events occurring. The stress level and survival of live fish delivery largely depend on the continuous HACCP concerned quality control to guarantee high survival results.
Traceability based on IoT technology (O-Marchante et al., 2014, Rodríguez-Jacobo, 2016, Wang, 2008) is an effective management tool integrated with HACCP to assist users in case of occurring food quality issues through the identification and comprehensive monitoring. Effective micro-ambient management ensures the freshness of aquatic products along the whole chain (Aung and Chang, 2014, Kim et al., 2016, Pizzuti and Mirabelli, 2015, Storøy et al., 2013). Although food traceability system is mature and widely-applied in other fields. However, the traceability system of the waterless transport and its HACCP control is not yet perfect. The current developed traceability approach that is used in fresh aquatic products transportation prove themselves can be easily adapted to the different aquatic supply chain by integrated wireless sensor network (Xiao, He, Fu, Xu, & Zhang, 2016), stress bio-sensing (Wu et al., 2015, Yonemori et al., 2009, Yoneyama et al., 2009, Zhang et al., 2017), RFID (Chen et al., 2014, Juarros, 2009, Li, 2015, Manzanares-Lopez et al., 2011, Trebar et al., 2013), QR (Kim and Woo, 2016a, Muradzikwa et al., 2014, Seine et al., 2004). However, the traditional traceability technologies are not directly adopted for waterless fish transportation due to the lack of dynamic ambient parameters acquisition and the intelligent adjustment. Therefore, a traceability system that is based on EPC technology, QR-code and it builds a wide range of traceable management is proposed by this research.
Generally, this research aims to develop an effective traceability system for waterless live transportation of Chinese sturgeon by integration of ambient sensing and quality control model to guarantee the fish vitality and survivability and it consists of 4 sections. In the first section, the drawbacks of the live fish transport in water and waterless dormant fish transport as a promising alternative delivery strategy are introduced. Next, the processing and materials of waterless fish transportation are developed to support optimized live transportation and the HACCP concerned quality control models as well as traceability system design are proposed for effective traceable management. Dynamic monitoring, analysis, and prediction of key points in HACCP system are discussed in section 3 by improving the monitoring and quality control under the micro-ambient conditions, the traceability system is amply designed to realize the well-suited tracing for the whole live fish supply chain. Finally, the conclusion of this research and the implications for future work are presented in section 4.
Section snippets
Materials and methods
Since 2000, China had been the world's largest producer of farmed sturgeon (Wei, He, Yang, Zheng, & Li, 2004). Sturgeon farms are now present in almost every province except Tibet autonomous region of China. Sturgeon aquaculture and market will be further expanded.
Results and discussions
This intelligent traceability system base WSN and RFID technologies could enhance safety and quality of live fish delivery and further enhance the competitive advantage of aquatic supply chains as a whole. The present study, for the first time, adopted quantitative analyses to identify improvement indices of the application of this advanced management platform from China's aquatic enterprises by introducing the QR-EPC-TS system. The system evaluation was carried out to assess the performance of
Conclusions
Traditional live fish transportation is high cost and lack of hazard analysis critical procedure control which greatly restrict the development scale of the live fish supply chain. In this paper, an innovative traceability system with the quality control models is presented and implemented based on an optimized HACCP plan for the waterless delivery of live aquatic products. The objective of this traceable platform is to provide optimal ambient parameters' adjustment to regulate the fish
Acknowledgments
This research is supported by the project assignment on the cross-disciplinary cooperation of Beijing Science and Technology New Star Program (Project ID Z181100006218123), Mechanism modeling and biosensor development for live fish transportation in waterless condition (Project ID 8-23) and A Project of Shandong Province Higher Educational Science and Technology Program (J18KA337).
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