A comparative study of cloud platforms for scalable infrastructure in food distribution supply chains

Abstract

Logistics and transportation problems are major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and inefficiencies. The food industry, as the largest component of the Logistics and Transportation sector, relies on physical supply chain networks that contact local producers, execute cold chains, and arrange the timely and safe delivery of food products – usually using third-party distributors. The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic highlighted the vulnerability of food supply chains, sometimes resulting in lost sales and wasted food, and created a social demand for innovative intermediaries and new sales channels. Popularly called AgTech – technologies for Agriculture – new business models and resources have emerged that seek to solve some of these problems, such as local sales networks directly connecting final customers to small to medium size producers.
Several of these AgTech resources are digital platforms hosted in the Cloud, that support current food distribution supply chain characteristics, and are easy to launch and profit from their owners. However, a deeper review demonstrates a research opportunity barrier that consists of a lack of frameworks to evaluate and compare different Cloud Platforms for this specific Class of Services. IT Infrastructure capabilities differ, considering current capabilities or drivers and specific Service-Level Requirements pre-defined by Platform owners or final Customers and would affect their performance in providing non-functional service quality required for this class of Services. This paper fills this gap, by proposing three main objectives. First, to identify and describe the current capabilities and challenges of Cloud provider solutions applied to the Food AgTech Industry, to identify and characterize the proposed driving Capability dimensions and the proposed requirements to the SLA for Food Industry Digital Platforms for Distribution, Customer Aggregation and Intermediation, and finally, to propose some Cloud Infrastructure Solutions that could deliver the technological characteristics focused on these attributes.