A collaborative food safety service agent architecture with alerts and trust

With the recent advances in Internet and mobile technologies, there are increasing demands for ubiquitous access to food safety information for service integration and gathering first hand information. However, due to disparate food trading information among different food suppliers throughout the food supply chain such as food importers, food wholesalers, food retailers, it is still difficult for citizens to use them effectively during their marketplace shopping. To overcome this problem, we propose a Collaborative Food Safety Agent System (CFSAS) based on a scalable, flexible, and intelligent Multi-Agent Information System (MAIS) architecture for proactive aids and trust-based decision support on food purchasing to citizens. We formulate our MAIS architecture for CFSAS further with agent clusters based on a case study of the Center for Food Safety (CFS) in Hong Kong. Agent clusters may comprise several types of agents to achieve the goals involved in the major processes of a food safety mechanism. We show how agents help citizens better plan, understand, and specify their preferences collaboratively with the CFSAS. We further illustrate how this can be implemented with Web service technologies to integrate disparate food information resources along the food supply chain.