Wireless Sensor Network and On-line Shelf-Life Prediction in Perishable Goods Supply Chain through First-Order Kinetic Model Valerio F. Annese, Giuseppe Loseto, Michele Ruta, Eugenio Di Sciascio and Daniela De Venuto Politecnico di Bari, Dept. of Electrical and Information Engineering – DEI, Via Orabona 4, 70125 Bari, Italy daniela.devenuto@poliba.it Abstract. The pursuit of new tools for monitoring the quality level of any kind of perishable product, in particular food, along all the supply chain, answers to the demand of reducing losses and waste and thus guaranteeing both customers’ safety and satisfaction and vendors’ interests. The combination of sensors with the wireless network technology offers an effective solution for facing this challenge. This paper describes a wireless sensor network (WSN) for the continuous monitoring of the environmental parameters (i.e. temperature, light exposition and relative humidity) of a warehouse for agricultural products storage. Moreover, the collected data are processed for evaluating products level of quality, represented by the shelf-life parameter, through a computation algorithm based on a first-order model of decay process where the decay rate is evaluated accordingly with Arrhenius Law. Funding: Italian Ministry of Economic Development MISE Program: “Certificazione e Sicurezza Alimentare mediante RFID” - CESAR (Food safety and certification using RFID technology) - “Bando RIDITT” ID Code: CUP B97G11000050008 Role of POLIBA: Lead partner Contact person: Daniela De Venuto Total Budget: € 2ML Poliba Budget: € 500K Number of partners: 5 Starting date: April 4 2012 End date: October 3 2014 Keywords: Food Safety ∙ Perishable Product ∙ Wireless Sensor Network ∙ Arrhenius Law ∙ Shelf-Life 1 Introduction The problem of global food losses and waste (FLW) refers to the reduction of food produced for human use from production to consumption phases. Whereas losses occur along all the steps of the supply chain, wastes are related to the consumption level [1]. It has been estimated that about 1.3 billion tons of food per year, equal to one-third of food produced for human consumption, is either lost or wasted [2].