Towards Spatial Decision Support System for Animals Traceability

Abstract

Animal traceability is a very important question for several government and private institutions from many points of view: economical, sanitary, etc. Traditional systems are able to memorize the main bovine movements, or to capture the geolocation of an animal using RFID. Now it should be possible to envisage a new generation of traceability systems in which the different locations are automatically recorded several times per day for each animal. These systems should also be coupled with analysis techniques to help decision-makers to take decisions, validate and/or reformulate their hypothesis. In this chapter the authors present a spatial decision support system dedicated to the animal geolocation acquisitions and analysis of possible sanitary problems. Indeed, in case of sanitary alerts, the system is able to determine the animals which have been in contact with a diseased animal exploiting historical trajectories of animals. It is applied to traceability of beef cattle using the Brazilian production system as a case study. OTAG focuses on improving methods and geotechnologies for recording reliable and accurate data on beef production.