Trade Control and Expert System

Preliminaries

Since the end of the nineteenth century, following the development of modern veterinary medicine and food safety, European states have build, in parallel with custom structures, veterinary inspection structures located in borders: Borders Inspection Posts. These structures check all goods from animal origin and live animal as well, in order to avoid outbreak of zoonoses and epizooties. Following the development of office automation and computer network in the eighties, many countries started to think about veterinary certification assisted by computers.

In the nineties, according to the First Pilar, the European Union with the aim to in-depth the Single Market and the protection of the consumers began to study how to provide a European scale computer network dedicated to food safety and animal health.

The TRACES network started up in April 2004 in replacement of the older ANIMO and SHIFT networks.