A Knowledge-Based System as a Sustainable Software Application for the Supervision and Intelligent Control of an Alcoholic Fermentation Process

Anca Sipos

doi:10.3390/su122310205

Abstract

One goal of specialists in food processing is to increase production efficiency in accordance with sustainability by optimising the consumption of raw food materials, water, and energy. One way to achieve this purpose is to develop new methods for process monitoring and control. In the winemaking industry, there is a lack of procedures regarding the common work based on knowledge acquisition and intelligent control. In the present article, we developed and tested a knowledge-based system for the alcoholic fermentation process of white winemaking while considering the main phases: the latent phase, exponential growth phase, and decay phase. The automatic control of the white wine’s alcoholic fermentation process was designed as a system on three levels. Level zero represents the measurement and adjustment loops of the bioreactor. At the first level of control, the three phases of the process are detected functions of the characteristics of the fermentation medium (the initial substrate concentration, the nitrogen assimilable content, and the initial concentration of biomass) and, thus, functions on the phase’s duration. The second level achieves the sequence supervision of the process (the operation sequence of a fermentation batch) and transforms the process into a continuous one. This control level ensures the quality of the process as well as its diagnosis. This software application can be extended to the industrial scale and can be improved by using further artificial intelligence techniques.

Highlights

The world is facing an unprecedented set of challenges and difficult problems, such as those related to energy and the environment, business and economics, food security, health, international stability, and the future of the technology, without knowing the long term effects on us and our planet [1,2].Under these circumstances, food technology is a dynamically developing area in applied research and industry
The information obtained from the case studies and from the experimental data; tthhee sepxepceiratliisnedthleitderoamtuarien. of the alcoholic fermentation processes;
The need to develop a new and sustainable technological process in the winemaking industry will be guided by the cost-efficiency of processing and the price competitiveness of the final products

Summary

Introduction

The world is facing an unprecedented set of challenges and difficult problems, such as those related to energy and the environment, business and economics, food security, health, international stability, and the future of the technology, without knowing the long term effects on us and our planet [1,2]. Due to the raw material variability and to the technological alcoholic fermentation process from white winemaking in general, researchers recommended that the automation control of this process be achieved via a knowledge-based system [9]. The existent documentation regarding the area of interest offers a global view of the issue and a clarification of the terminology specific to the domain It has identified keywords and constructed search terms by examining recent literature reviews relating to the wine fermentation process (conditions, microbiological, chemical, and physical characteristic variables, models, process control) [4,5,6], and it has retrieved data from the Scopus and Web of Science libraries since the year 1989. White grape must enrich with B1 vitamin (thiamine) wine yeast: Saccharomyces oviformis and Saccharomyces ellipsoideus temperature stirring speed temperature stirring speed

The Automatic Control of the Alcoholic Fermentation Process

Results and Discussion

Implementation of the Software Application on a Fermentation Process Control

Conclusions