Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
back products and product related information in order to ensure quality and safety.
Beside GTNet®, TraceTracker AG also offers deep market knowledge in the field
of ICT solutions for food supply chains.
The High Performance Computing Centre (HLRS) is a research and service
institution affiliated to the University of Stuttgart. It has been the first national
supercomputing centre in Germany and is offering services to academic users
and industry. HLRS is participating actively in the Software as a Service (SaaS) /
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) movement and has been doing so since the
advent of the Grid. The current research focus continues along this line to include
aspects related to Cloud computing, distributed data management, future models
for distributed execution, quality of service maintenance, virtual collaboration and
organization etc. HLRS is and has been involved in several large initiatives in this
domain for quite some time now, involving amongst others Akogrimo, TrustCoM,
NextGRID, BREIN and BEinGRID.
The Communication Systems Group (CSG) at the Department of Informatics
(IFI) at the University of Zürich (UZH) is the business models and exploitation
task leader within the Business Experiment. Related activities in AgroGrid - found
primarily in the area of business planning and Grid technology support - benefit
from this research group's established scientific footprint, which puts a major focus
on addressing economic management of networking resources, Point to Point (P2P)
and overlay networks, and security considerations. Furthermore, accounting and
auditing in distributed and heterogeneous systems, charging of Internet Protocol (IP)
services as well as Virtual Organisations outline the research focus of those experts.
Finally, the project partner Universitaet Hohenheim hosts one of the leading
German research groups in the area of enterprise application systems for service
and logistic industries: the chair Information Systems 2. In addition, Universitaet
Hohenheim has a very long tradition and an international well established repu-
tation in agricultural research. The chair Information Systems 2 contributes agri-
cultural domain and logistics knowledge, Grid experience and expertise in Virtual
Organisation Management. Information Systems 2 was the specialist for Virtual
Organisations in Grid and expert in supply chain tracking and tracing.
11.2 Description of the Technological Solution
In order to solve identified problems described in the previous section, AgroGrid
introduces Grid technology in the agricultural sector by offering a full lifecycle
solution for dynamic capacity markets which integrates VO and SLA (Service Level
Agreement) management with the market leading solution in global distributed
tracking and tracing, GTNet® (Volk et al. 2009b). Additionally, AgroGrid provides
a means to monitor and evaluate quality and safety of food trade units delivered
across the supply chains.
To address the challenges of quality, food safety and data ownership, and, in
contrast to centralized tracking and tracing solutions, AgroGrid's solution is based
on a decentralized architecture for distributed tracking and tracing data. This allows
