Possibilities for Applying Data Mining for Early Warning in Food Supply Networks

In food supply networks, ensuring quality of end products is a critical issue. The quality of these products depends in a complex way on many factors. In order to effectively control food quality, our research aims at implementing early warning and proactive control systems in food supply networks. In these systems we use data mining techniques and exploit large amounts of operational data collected throughout such a network. This paper investigates requirements on data mining in mentioned early warning systems and maps these requirements to available data mining methods. Results of a preliminary case study show that data mining is a promising approach as part of early warning systems in food supply networks.