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Over the past five decades, the world dairy sector has undergone substantial changes with significant intensification, scale-up and production efficiency, driven by the demands of a growing human population and cash flow incomes. This growth has been made possible by developments in animal husbandry, nutrition, feed efficiency, animal health, housing and automation, as well as supporting policies, strategies and organizations. However, these changes are not reflected in the dairy sector as a whole and while some developing countries have experienced a major expansion of small-scale dairy production, in other countries it has largely stagnated. Dairy production contributes positively to human welfare in several ways: providing nutrition through quality food products, income and employment, consumption of organic fertilizers and other social economic goods. However, there are negative aspects associated with the dairy industry, including its contribution to the production of greenhouse gases, environmental pollution and the difficulty of waste disposal, food safety and human health, the use of cereals for animal feed, animal welfare and the erosion of biodiversity. To inform the public and make rational policy and investment decisions in the dairy sector, it is essential to understand these complex interactions fully and their consequences. The security of raw milk in Morocco is generally low. In response to the erratic hygiene (Glouib et al., 2006) of cattle farms and the resulting high microbial load of raw milk, Moroccan legislation requires the pasteurization of raw milk. Informal dairy chains can therefore constitute a danger to consumer safety. Average annual consumption of dairy products is relatively low (38 kg per capita), but varies considerably according to consumer income. Six types of dairy institutions can be distinguished in Morocco: (i) livestock breeders; (ii) milk collection cooperatives; (iii) milk collectors/vendors in informal chains; (iv) traditional milk shops (known locally as Mahlabates); (v) industrial processors of dairy products; and (vi) various suppliers of services (veterinary and insemination) and products (animal feed, machinery, etc.). Currently, three types of dairy chains (kuper et al, 2007) are active in Morocco. The first are private chains that collect milk from farms and industrial dairy processors through milk collection cooperatives. Their activities are dominated by a single operator, the dairy power plant, which processes nearly 60 per cent of the milk volumes processed by the industrialists and has strong links with the international dairy company Danone. This ensures the availability of high-quality dairy derivatives on the Moroccan market. The second type of chain is based on cooperative processing and has recently seen the emergence of a very competitive cooperative, COPAG, which processes approximately 20% of the total milk volumes, processed by manufacturers and is based in southern Morocco. The third type of dairy chain is based on informal channels, with milk being processed into traditional products by small workshops and sold directly to consumers. These informal channels involve a variable number of operators and are mainly active in the dairy basins near the major urban centers.
The objective of this work is to develop a decision support tool based on the Internet of Things technologies to optimize milk collection routes, reduce the cost of milk transport, and improve the milk collection density. In the supply chain, the Internet of Things devices represent an effective means of tracking and authenticating products and shipments, based on the GPS and other technologies. They can also monitor product storage conditions, improving quality management throughout the supply chain.
The structure of this work is divided as follow, we start by the related work section then in the second section, we describe the basic concept of the internet of things and it is majors forces, the next section, will be dedicated to processing of dairy system in Morocco and we describe the traditional strategy used for the transportation and the collection of milk. The fourth section, showing in detail the proposed distributed strategy dedicated to the milk-run system based on the IoT technologies combined with the swarming intelligence system to find and search the best dairy best path planning. After this, we discuss the simulation process of our new system based on real-life cases to analyze the results of our system compared with the traditional method used for the collection of milk in Morocco. Finally, we finish our work with a general conclusion that a summary of our job is done in this paper, which aims to find a new distributed and efficient strategy to improve the productivity of the milk-run transportation system in Morocco.