Today, enterprises in the agricultural sector collaborate in fixed partner structures with long term contract relations.
Short term appearing peaks in supply and demand of capacities cannot be leveled out by using appropriate supply chain management systems involving all market partners.
Thus, today’s capacities cannot be exploited in an economic efficient manner. 
So, the motivation of Agrogrid is to enable companies to deploy their capacities extensively and, simultaneously, to ensure food safety via efficient tracking and tracing of goods.
Therefore, concepts from the Grid-community will be employed to represent the sharing of distributed resources.

The BE 22 blueprints and develops the AgroGrid platform which can be used by enterprises of the agriculture IT industry in order to offer their respective customers – food supply chain companies – a solution for building dynamic supply-chains and monitoring food quality in these supply-chains.

AgroGrid – aims for the introduction of Grid technology into the agriculture IT industry in order to enable companies delivering better, cheaper and faster services.
In order to achieve AgroGrid’s vision, the following objectives are pursued:

• Build a VO with dynamic composition for food supply chains;
• Offer open, standards-based, and semantics-enhanced Grid services for a VO providing monitoring information of goods in the supply-chain in each step and for each participant;
• Offer trust-building and commercialization support mechanisms which complements supply-chain building and monitoring mechanisms.

The platform realized by AgroGrid consists of the AgroGrid portal and monitoring infrastructure.

The AgroGrid portal provides a web-based user interface to AgroGrid services, like capacity publication, capacity query, Service Level Agreement negotiation and evaluation-reporting.
It integrates all AgroGrid services into a common interface with a unified look-and-feel, enabling, after successful user-authentication and authorization, a user-friendly interaction to all services.
The monitoring infrastructure of the AgroGrid platform is based upon GTNet® functionality, which maintains tracking and tracing information of food-trade-units in local databases of all supply-chain members.
It enables monitoring of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between supply-chain members, based on query of monitoring information stored alongside supply-chain members’ databases.
After, it generates an evaluation report, describing the status – compliance or deviations - of monitored supply-chains and SLAs.
The generated evaluation report is made accessible to supply-chain partners via the portal.

AgroGrid enables market players of the food industry to establish dynamic supply chains on demand. This is facilitated by the SLA management-supported publishing and booking capacities in a Grid-enabled market place that integrates with the market leading solution for global traceability, GTNet®.

The capacities cover production- and logistics-related capabilities. Capacities are classified in a tree-like catalogue and bound to an SLA template. This SLA template determines the structured characteristics description of a given capacity. Published capacities, accordingly, dispose of an instantiated SLA template, filled with specific characteristic values, constituting a capacity offer.

The booking of published capacities includes a SLA negotiation phase in which involved market players shape and finally agree on offer details. Agreements lead to establishment or adaptation of a dynamic Virtual Organization that reflect the respective supply chain in relation to a booked capacity. Tracing information on actually exchanged trade units between VO members are made available in GTNet®. This data serves as the main input to SLA evaluation leading to a report on compliance or deviations between agreed capacities and traded units, respectively.

• Universität Hohenheim

• High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS)

• Universität Zürich

• TraceTracker AG

• BEinGRID Industry Days – June 3-5, 2008 – Barcelona, Spain