Information fusion enabled system for monitoring the vitality of live crabs during transportation

Crabs have a high nutritional and economic value and there is an increased demand for live crabs. However, live crabs have limited shelf life and they are susceptibility to death and spoilage during transportation. Monitoring live crab vitality during transportation in the supply chain to meet consumer acceptability is vital. In this study, an information fusion enabled live crab viability monitoring system was developed. Hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP) analysis was used to identify potential hazards and critical control points in the transportation supply chain that affect live crab vitality. Multi-source information during live crab transportation was collected by integrating temperature, relative humidity, oxygen, alcohol, aldehyde, and impedance sensors. The predictive modelling of live crab vitality based on information fusion effectively improved, the utilisation of information and the accuracy of vitality prediction. An ensemble learning based soft-voting classifier outperformed the individual performances of other models (i.e. support vector machine, random forest, k-nearest neighbour) and it achieved accuracy above 99% and 86% at 4 °C and 25 °C. The system evaluation indicated that the developed information fusion-based vitality monitoring offers the possibility of ubiquitous monitoring of the vitality of aquatic products in the transportation supply chain and improves the economic efficiency of the supply chain.