On the way toward the sector spanning agrifood process traceability

Having overviewed the state-of-art in agrifood traceability, the paper focuses on the multiscale modeling of the underlying problems. The main conclusion is, that there are not really workable sector spanning traceability methods, but the field experts and the computer modeling community seems to be prepared to develop quite new tools in the near future. According to our opinion, the sector encompassing IT centers ought to find a reasonable compromise between the “Schylla” of the simple, step by step passing of traceable unit IDs for the neighboring actors, and the “Carybdis” of accumulating enormously huge databases, containing every relevant data of the actors. The future role of the sector spanning, outside intelligent centers is to provide traceability and trackability service for the actors on cooperative basis of the mutual interests. In addition, the centers have to support the supply chain and value chain management, as well as the work of the authorities, that are responsible for the human health. Present study provides a good basis to our future development of a really sector spanning method. In a following paper we shall outline a sector spanning system on the basis of the Direct Computer Mapping based simulation methodology, in detail.