Exploring the application of Industry 4.0 technologies in the agricultural food supply chain: A systematic literature review
Introduction
Agriculture has its unique importance in many countries as it carries the responsibility of feeding the whole population. Furthermore, this is made possible through managing the various flows of different stakeholders involved to satisfy the need of end consumers, thus forming a complete AFSC network. In literature, this is also referred to as “Farm to Fork supply chain,” “Plough to Plate supply chain”, “Agri/agro-food supply chain” among others. Some of the stakeholders involved in AFSC consist of “farmers, consumers, agricultural suppliers, food processor & distributors, non-government organizations (NGOs), national & international agricultural agencies, government and concerned institutions” (Viswanadham and Kameshwaran, 2013, Kayikci et al., 2020). Recently, customer’s confidence in AFSC has been shattered by few food incidents like “trench oil”, “clenbuterol” “Sudan red” and “sanlu toxic milk powder” in China (Jing et al., 2012), “horsemeat scandal” in Europe (Boyacı et al., 2014), “salmonella outbreak” in the USA, genetically modified food, and mad cow diseases (Aung and Chang, 2014) among others. With growing awareness about food safety and security, the need for embedding modern technology into AFSC has become a need of the hour. In addition, the emergence of I4.0 in manufacturing has tipped other sectors to bring a similar revolution (Shukla & Shankar, 2022). I4.0 is the fourth industrial revolution characterized by decentralization, digitization, automation, virtualization, machine-2-machine communication, and real-time data acquisition and processing (de Sousa Jabbour et al., 2018). The journey of the industrial revolution started with steam engines and mechanical power in I1.0, while electricity brought mass production in I2.0. Automation and electronics powered I3.0, while recent technological development and CPS formed the basis for I4.0 (Lezoche et al., 2020). Thus, I4.0 technologies are the driving force for this revolution. In addition, the potential of utilizing I4.0 concept in AFSC is not hidden as it prevents unnecessary waste (muda) and reduces the economic burden of outbreaks, product recalls, and cross-contamination (Kayikci et al., 2020). I4.0 technologies can make AFSC more intelligent, smart, integrated, data-driven, agile, autonomous, connected system. Furthermore, I4.0 technologies for improvement in other sectors are well documented, but similar applications in AFSC are limited. Thus, there is a need to investigate I4.0 technologies responsible for transformation of AFSC.
Technology adds value to each stage of AFSC. Some of these value-added activities by I4.0 technologies are shown in Fig. 1. At the production and processing stage, technologies support sustainable production practices, precision agriculture, and quality evaluation of raw material suppliers. In addition to this, I4.0 technologies provide information that helps in various decision-making at different stages of AFSC. Technology assists the distribution stage by providing real-time monitoring, waste reduction, and more innovative logistic operations, including sharing. Technology facilitates effective agro e-commerce & trading at the consumption stage, provides provenance tracking options, and promotes circular economy initiatives.
The significance of technology can be understood from real-world projects like “TraceRegister”, “m-fish,” and “ThisFish,” which make use of technologies to capture real-time data and correspondingly transform its digital asset for better monitoring of food flows in AFSC. However, the accountability of such a system will be hampered if the central agency is malfunctioning. A similar case arises in sea foods where the regulation of fisheries and other related items is a big concern for countries irrespective of being developing or developed. Further, to address such a global seafood crisis, the “United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)” lays the rules and regulations (UNEP, 2009). In such cases, technology like blockchain and IoT could conveniently track provenance and food control through proper monitoring mechanisms.
I4.0 technologies help AFSC make it more sustainable and resilient by facilitating information sharing and collaboration. Furthermore, I4.0 technology supports supply chain coordination, which is essential to preserve sustainability. The recent developments in technology and agricultural methods have triggered the emergence of smart farming (SF), leading to better control of agricultural practices. In simple terms, SF is a farming management concept that uses information and modern technologies to optimize complex agriculture systems. Thus, using SF, farmers can better control and monitor agro-practices, resulting in increased efficiency and productivity. Furthermore, increased demand for quality and quantity of food has intensified the agricultural sector's industrialization, demanding a better agro-food supply chain ecosystem. For such circumstances, I4.0 technologies like “IoT, big data, CC, ICT, CPS and blockchain” is of immense importance. With growing concerns about food safety and security, regulation, and monitoring, this paper aims to review all such technologies that could change the AFSC ecosystem's future. Keeping this view in mind, the following research questions (RQ) are encountered and need to be answered:
RQ1: What are the recent I4.0 technological developments in AFSC?
RQ2: What are the current statuses and areas where each of I4.0 technological developments has been applied in AFSC?
RQ3: What approaches, tools, and methodology have been used to adopt I4.0 technologies in AFSC?
RQ4: What are the significant challenges and future research agenda in the concerned theme?
To address these RQ, a systematic literature review (SLR) method is adopted. According to Meredith (1993), a SLR enable “integrating a number of different works on the same topic, summarizing the common elements, contrasting the differences, and extending the work in some fashion”. In addition, conducting a structured review enables synthesizing in exploring a growing field of knowledge in a more appropriate manner (Miemczyk et al., 2012), such as the recent technologies addressed in this study and their potential impacts on the AFSC ecosystem.
To explain the need of the literature review and justify our contribution in line with existing literatures, previous reviews in the field are summarized in Table 1. It shows that few reviews considered the application of technologies and its impacts on the AFSC. For instance, Costa et al. (2013) addressed RFID applications while Verdouw et al., 2013, Bouzembrak et al., 2019 discussed IoT-based research in AFSC. Big data-related reviews are addressed by Kamilaris et al. (2017) and Sharma et al. (2018). As Blockchain is a trending field in recent years, most reviews are focused on this field (Zhao et al., 2019, Antonucci et al., 2019; Duan et al., 2020; and Feng et al., 2020). These review papers address only a single technology, but none have discussed these technologies in conjunction with I4.0 perspective except the Lezoche et al. (2020), which survey four I4.0 technologies but is more descriptive work than an SLR or bibliometric review.
Contrary to this, our work is an SLR covering six major I4.0 technologies applied in AFSC under one unified approach. Moreover, other I4.0 technologies like augmented reality, autonomous robots, digital twins, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, 3D printing, etc., exist but are not as prevalent in AFSC as the reviewed six technologies in this work. Further, the transformation of AFSC to meet the future food demands could be complemented by applying the concept related to I4.0, precision, and smart farming since these concepts are closely associated with I4.0 technologies. Thus, the need arises to understand the recent developments of these technologies to have their correct applications. In addition, the challenges related to the implementation of these technologies and future research direction need to be documented for the researchers to make further development in this area.
Section 2 details the research methodology used for this review work, while the recent developments of I4.0 technologies are discussed in Section 3. Section 4 illustrates the classification of reviewed literature. In addition, the major research areas and applications of each technology are discussed in Section 5, and future research directions are summarized in Section 6. Finally, Section 7 briefs about the concluding remarks of the present work.
Section snippets
Research methodology
In this paper, an SLR is conducted to address the research questions described in the previous section. Further, a literature review is “a systematic, explicit, and reproducible design for identifying, evaluating and interpreting the existing body of recorded documents” (Fink 1998). Here, SLR is conducted following similar papers (for example, Ashby et al., 2012, Brandenburg et al., 2014) and based on the classical four steps methodology proposed by Mayring (2003) as follows:
Step 1: Material
Recent technological developments in AFSC
Over the years, AFSC has gone through many transformations, and sophisticated technology embedment is a recent one. Technologies have changed the structure of traditional AFSC and have brought more leverage to its stakeholders. This section will discuss a few such technologies that are revolutionizing the AFSC and will be the future of AFSC (da Silveira et al., 2021).
Classification for trend evaluation
The classification of published articles shows that most of the works are being carried out in Asian countries where China is the leader, followed by India. AFSC research related to blockchain and IoT adoption and implementation is more prevalent in China, while Indian research has widely spread across blockchain IoT. ICT, and CPS technology. Italy and the USA have significant research contributions on all reviewed technologies except CPS and BD. Spain's research inclination is towards IoT, CC,
Finding and discussion - major research dimension in AFSC
Technologies have been a critical element in improving the various processes in AFSC. Moreover, with time, there has been an improvement in technologies too, and their roles have been changed as per specific requirements of the AFSC. In this section, we have discussed a few of the major research dimensions in AFSC and the role of technologies in this regard.
Existing research challenges and future directions
It is being observed that technologies can play a significant role in today’s AFSC in the wake of various growing concerns. Furthermore, technologies embedment in AFSC will also leverage many benefits to all stakeholders and be very handy to mitigate various risks. However, adopting technology in the existing system requires capital expenditure, which must be justified. Furthermore, as agriculture is hugely manual-intensive work, the capital expenditure on technology is lower. Thus, there is a
Conclusion
This work addresses the four RQs, where the first RQ about the recent technological developments in AFSC is discussed in section three. The second RQ about present scenarios of I4.0 technological developments and the third RQ about adoption approaches are elaborated in sections four and five. The fourth RQ about challenges and future research directions is dealt with briefly in Section 6. In a nutshell, this work carries out an SLR where six significant I4.0 technological advancements, namely
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Vinay Surendra Yadav: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Methodology, Data curation, Formal analysis, Project administration. A.R. Singh: Writing – original draft, Data curation, Formal analysis, Project administration. Rakesh D. Raut: Data curation, Formal analysis, Project administration, Writing – original draft. Sachin Kumar Mangla: Project administration, Writing – original draft. Sunil Luthra: Project administration, Writing – original draft. Anil Kumar: Project administration.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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