TransportF| Food for Thought

Food for Thought

Your challenge is to consider the journey of food to your plate, determine how disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic are affecting the food supply locally and globally, and propose solutions to address these issues.

Controlled transportation of the food supply during a pandemic

Summary

To achieve a free flow of the food items among various places during a pandemic, this project aims to provide a service to the distributors who are responsible for the distribution of various food items. The main goal of this service is to provide suggestions to the distributors on how safe it is to transport food to a region based on a few factors like the number of COVID cases in a region, population density, weather, and nighttime lights.

How We Addressed This Challenge

One of the main challenges during a pandemic is the supply of food from the producers to consumers. To ensure the safe transport of food, achieving a low density of food transport vehicles on the road by alerting the distributors or drivers about the present situation based on real-time data of various factors is considered as one of the solutions.

The working of the project:

Our service is considered to be provided as a mobile app and also as a web platform. TransportF takes the kind of food item that is being transported, the location to which it is being transported, and the date on which they wish to transport the food as inputs from the user and suggests few time slots during when it is safe to transport the food without being exposed to COVID-19/ any other pandemic. These suggestions of time slots for safe transport are evaluated based on a few parameters and they are:

  • The number of COVID cases in the region to which the food is being transported. The more the number of cases, the less is the number of food vehicles that are allowed to the region.
  • The weather of the time slot selected.  Only specific kinds of weather suit specific foods for transportation.
  • The population density of the region to which the food is being transported. This is a static data which is used along with the nighttime lights data to know the density of the population. The more the density the more are the chances of exposure to a pandemic, hence the less is the number of vehicles that are allowed.
  • Nighttime light data is also used to know the moment of the population during the pandemic which is in turn used to calculate the population density.
  • Finally, the number of food vehicles traveling at a specific time to a specific region is also considered and is calculated based on the number of users using this service.
How We Developed This Project

Food is one of the three basic necessities (food, shelter, and clothing) for human survival. The very worriment of getting food on our plates has been enhanced by this unprecedented pandemic. This inspired us to eliminate the obstacle that is bothering food supply and achieve an efficient way of the distribution of food in the hotspots of the pandemic. We, as a team, gathered all the problems persisting in the food industry during this pandemic and choose to work on its transportation sector. We have considered the resources provided by NASA and also used two external sources called CoronaTab to obtain the real-time data of the region-wise number of COVID cases and OpenWeatherMap to obtain the weather data. We, currently, are planning to use the web platform to deploy our service as a website using various web development tools like Nodejs, HTML, and JS, and soon as a mobile application. One of the main tools we have used is NASA'S EARTHDATA SEARCH to obtain the population density data and nighttime light data. We have also used "draw.io" as a tool to draw our initial flowchart draft of the phase-1 of the project. Few problems we faced while developing this project are on how to determine the controlling mechanism for the safe transport of the food distribution vehicles and to see that there isn't any overlay of more vehicles in a single route. This challenge was solved by introducing a concept of time slots i.e. a controlled movement of food vehicles in specific periods based on a few parameters as mentioned in the working. We also expect that this would be more efficient and stringent with the co-operation of the government to verify the control of the movement of vehicles that transport food during this pandemic.

Project Demo

Screenshots of the demo TransportF website along with the flowchart of the transportation of food : Slides

Data & Resources
Tags
#transportation #distribution #foodsupply
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.