FoodChain-Lab: A trace-back, trace-forward and food chain analysis too

The analysis and visualization of supply chain data is a key challenge during almost all food mediated disease outbreak situations, as in the case of the Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli O104:H4 outbreak in Germany in 2011. During this incident, appropriate tools had to be developed ad-hoc to enable the necessary tracing of suspicious foods along the supply chain, namely salad ingredients, sprouts, and seeds. The developed software made it possible to trace back food commodities which had been consumed at locations identified as the most probable site of infection (outbreak clusters). A newly developed relational database with integrated consistency and plausibility checks was used to collate these data for further analysis. The connections between suppliers, distributors, and producers were able to be visualized in network graphs and geographic projections. On the basis of this specifically created software, an improved and more comprehensive solution called FoodChain-Lab has been developed which will be presented during this talk. Technically, FoodChain-Lab is an extension of the open-source data integration and analysis platform KNIME (www.knime.org ) from which it inherits beneficial properties like modularity, flexibility and extensibility. The open-source software HSQLDB is used additionally as a database engine. FoodChain-Lab is designed to be used in foodborne outbreak situations to identify common sources of the outbreak and to analyze and visualize supply chains related to the crisis situation. It has already been successfully applied in recent outbreak situations and could become a community resource further developed collaboratively by interested stakeholders. Food- Chain-Lab has been developed by the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, Germany and is available on request.