IntelliFood and the perishable foods in the light of questions

What are the unique selling points of the company?

Seacon Europe was founded in 2005 in Hungary. This SME, R&D intensive, develops customized software and out-of-box applications with .Net and Java platforms in various business areas: log analysis, fleet management, sensor-network based analyzer and controlling/monitoring applications. Moreover, Seacon Europe always dealt with research and development in new areas.

What are the main aspects of your project?

Our goal is to develop software with an hardware-software architecture that communicates wirelessly and an overlaid controlling/monitoring solution. The lowest level of our solution is a foolproof sensor network which can be maintained with low energy; the top level solution is an intelligent information software system providing complex analysis.

In the area of food industry we develop controlling software based on objective measurements, which will be built in several stages of the supply chain, starting from storage through production to delivery, in order to increase the food security and reduce the related risks or ensure the traceability of the products and materials.

Thanks to our solution the measurement mechanisms are built-in in the manufacturing process and the known parameters can be integrated with other production and environmental characteristics, by transmitting to the food industry players innovative information based on complex analysis results performed with intelligent method.

How did you work on the project idea?

We would like to provide our customers innovative solutions, but we also use our past experiences. We prefer think together with our customers and figure out the best solutions. If we see that our solution is positive for an area, we try to use them in another area as well. Therefore, we are looking for customers who are receptive to innovative solutions and also for projects that are useful in practice. We think it is a very good idea to promote the dissemination of new technology with tenders, since innovation always involves high costs. In our projects, we are applying wireless sensor network, intelligent analyzes and FIWARE-based solutions in industrial environment.

We have already developed applications based on sensor networks, such as industrial and agricultural solutions. We focus on the utilization, the presentation/visualization and the intelligent analysis of data, considering that our real specialty is to help background understanding. In connection with the application of agricultural sensors, we had the idea to make something more, measuring the storage and the processing phases. These solutions, rather than quantity, place the emphasis on quality.

What is the new and innovative aspect of your solution?

To sum up, the innovative functions of our solution are:

• Joint control and monitoring of the various stages of the food supply chain using objective measurement data collection.
• Preparation of summary reports and analyzes about the various stages of the food supply chain.
• Intelligent information module that provides to professionals an opportunity to optimize food production and storage (transport) and to reduce costs.

What  do you think about Fiware and Fi Space?

Our sensor-network based applications collect data and one of the uses of these data is checking them and sending alarms/notifications, we aimed to use so in the first stage the Orion Context Broker and Complex Event Processing Enablers. This is the first project where we really use these tools. Pilot exercises were tested on what they know.

There are also many other FIWARE components that we have already reviewed and we found one that we want to try. We hope that this will also soon be available. For example, the Open Data theory is very close to us and we would like to use it. The Big Data tools are also very interesting and we gather the knowledge about them.

In our experience, achieve the components in the cloud is sometimes uncertain, but we know this is under progress and it is the sign that the tools became popular. In addition, the access to the documentation on the website sometimes fails, probably because the load is too high. The FIWARE support team is very active and positive. A good idea is the weekly phone call with the access options to the questions, but we will take this advantage in the intensive stage of development. It really seems that the FIWARE team wants to provide practical assistance and not increase the administrative burden.

We have not really used the FISpace facilities , but we think it is a very good idea and a useful possibility for companies who want to develop their relationship. We have already received invitations for webinars linked to our specialties and we attended some of them.