CNS: Collaborative Research: EAGER: From Computer Networks to Food Networks

食品来自全国各地和世界各地，从农场到餐桌的食品供应链极其复杂。不幸的是，在美国，高达20-30%的新鲜食品在到达顾客手中时就已经变质了，而同样数量的食品又被顾客扔掉了，至少部分原因是缺乏新鲜度。因此，了解粮食网络和设计减少损失的机制可以产生巨大的经济和环境影响。这个项目的目的是通过应用和扩展计算机网络科学的技术来理解和改进食品分配网络，这些技术可以处理超出食品网络规模的巨大复杂性。食品网络的独特特性将需要超越计算机网络技术水平的重大创新，因此也将为新型和新兴的复杂计算机网络提供有价值的结果。“食物网络”的设计和优化提出了许多挑战，需要创新，这些创新有望使食物网络和计算机网络都受益。特别是，食品网络涉及独特的“腐烂包”（包装内容的质量持续下降），需求驱动和以质量为中心的交付和分配，网络内“包”的捆绑/分绑，各种“有效载荷”的混合，以及包来源和类型的动态变化。本提案的目的是解决这些挑战，并为食品网络的系统设计和操作奠定基础。由于许多这些挑战也与计算机网络相关，因此建议的工作也将在该背景下考虑它们。特别是，该研究将研究与网络内数据包捆绑/解捆绑、基于内容（而不是基于地址）的路由/分发、多模态数据的QoS感知转发以及中断容忍操作相关的问题。面对最大限度利用季节性和当地食品的新趋势，这项研究还将允许更好地管理食品网络，这需要食品采购和分销网络的极大灵活性和动态可配置性。

With food sourced from every part of the country and from around the world, food supply chains are extremely complex pathways from farm to the table. Unfortunately, up to 20-30% of the fresh food is spoiled by the time it reaches the customer in US, and a similar amount is further thrown away by the customers at least partly due to lack of freshness. Thus, understanding food networks and devising mechanisms to reduce losses can have huge economic and environmental impact. The purpose of this project is to understand and improve food distribution networks by applying and extending techniques from the science of computer networking, which can handle tremendous amounts of complexity beyond the scales seen in food networks. The unique characteristics of food networks will require significant innovations beyond the state of the art in computer networking and thus will provide valuable results for novel and emerging complex computer networks as well. The design and optimization of a "food network" poses many challenges and requires innovations that are expected to benefit both food networks and computer networks. In particular, food network involve unique 'rotting packets' (continuous decrease in quality of the package contents), a demand-driven and quality-centric delivery and distribution, in-network bundling/unbundling of 'packets', mixing of a large variety of 'payloads', and dynamic changes to packet sources and types. The purpose of this proposal is to address these challenges and lay the foundation for a systematic design and operation of food networks. Since many of these challenges are relevant to computer networks as well, the proposed work will consider them in that context as well. In particular, the research will examine issues relating to in-network bundling/unbundling of packets, content based (rather than address based) routing/distribution, QoS aware forwarding of multi-modal data, and disruption tolerant operation. The research will also allow for better management of the food networks in the face of emerging trends in maximal utilization of seasonal and local foods which requires significant flexibility and dynamic configurability in the food sourcing and distribution networks.