Resilient Value Chains for Food Production

The agriculture and food industry is characterized by highly interconnected value chains, both at a local and global level. If nothing else, the coronavirus crisis demonstrated that resilience to all types of disruption offers a key competitive advantage. Resilient value chains in the agriculture and food industry are not only characterized by food and its intermediate products being available quickly again following a disruption but, above all, by the safety of food products. Assessing resilience in the agriculture and food industry must therefore include food safety, with its complex effects on the supply chain and on production in particular.
Ensuring that food safety and supplying the population are systemic tasks subject to complex influences. Supplying basic foodstuffs relies on volatile, globally interconnected networks with complex material flows and supply chains. Research and discussions with companies and professional associations revealed industry-wide pressure to act to improve resilience in food production, and to do so primarily against a background of more and more frequent crisis situations and an increasing scarcity of resources.
At production level, networking food manufacturing systems increases resilience. At individual system level, the implementation and systematic assessment of sensors may significantly improve transparency about potential technical incidents or impairments of the food quality. Such incidents may, for example, occur as a result of impairing the ecosystem of crops. Identifying predictable and unpredictable negative effects as much as possible improves the decision-making ability of the system, and is a prerequisite for the adaptive self-regulation of production and processing systems.
Both use cases, "Vertical Farming" at Fraunhofer IME and "New Vegetable Oil Mills" at Fraunhofer IVV, show the successful application of resilient system architecture for both technical resilience and ecosystem resilience. A digital shadow was designed for both use cases, based on potential incidents, to determine the influencing variables and product quality variables. Undertaking digital transformation and equipping the vertical farming facility OrbiPlant® with suitable sensors enabled technical incidents and impairments of the ecosystem to be simulated and then identified and detected in real time as a result of greater data transparency. The demonstrably increased resilience maturity of the production facility may make an important contribution to safeguarding the supply of safe, high-quality food in the future.