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

由于食品来自全国各地和世界各地，食品供应链是从农场到餐桌的极其复杂的途径。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变质了，并且至少部分地由于缺乏新鲜度，类似的数量被顾客进一步扔掉。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。该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善食品分销网络，这些技术可以处理超出食品网络规模的大量复杂性。食物网络的独特特性将需要超越计算机网络技术的重大创新，从而也将为新颖和新兴的复杂计算机网络提供有价值的结果。“粮食网络”的设计和优化提出了许多挑战，需要创新，预计将有利于粮食网络和计算机网络。特别是，食品网络涉及独特的“腐烂的包”（包装内容质量的持续下降），需求驱动和以质量为中心的交付和分发，网络内捆绑/解捆绑的“包”，混合各种各样的“有效载荷”，以及动态变化的包源和类型。本提案的目的是应对这些挑战，并为粮食网络的系统设计和运作奠定基础。由于这些挑战中有许多也与计算机网络有关，因此拟议的工作也将在这一背景下考虑这些挑战。特别是，研究将探讨有关的问题，在网络捆绑/解捆绑的数据包，基于内容（而不是基于地址）的路由/分发，QoS感知多模式数据的转发，和中断容忍操作。面对最大限度地利用季节性和本地食品的新趋势，这项研究还将有助于更好地管理食品网络，这需要食品采购和分销网络具有显着的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.