Food Passports and Intelligent Food Recipes: The Data-Oriented Way of Producing Food

Abstract

This paper discusses a Multiagent System architecture and its supporting concepts and technical implementation for food-producing systems. The Food and Beverages industry is in dire need of embracing more advanced industrial digitization practices to be able to meet immediate sustainability requirements. One such challenge is improving and optimizing resource utilization. A more rationalized use of raw materials, production processes and machinery is a key aspect of the latter. At the same time, food is still produced, in many instances, in a very traditional way, particularly when it comes to ingredient selection. The architecture introduced in this paper has the ambition of articulating the supply and demand of food products based in the technical characteristics of food (e.g., composition, nutritional content and value, processing efficiency, and taste profiles) instead of the more traditional characteristics. To that end, the paper introduces, among other key concepts, the notion of the Digital Food Identity Card as an active digital document that stores such technical information and the notion of Dynamic Recipe as an active software entity with the dynamic capability of adjusting production parameters in a recipe to market conditions, as well as coordinating the resources included in the execution of a industrial food recipe. Both concepts are modeled as agents and part of the proposed architecture. Finally, the paper provides a formal grammar for a domain specific language, that can be used by human specialists to define a dynamic recipe and be simultaneously interpreted by Dynamic Recipe Agents to enact the behaviours previously described. The domain specific language is an integral part of the architecture, together with the agent-based formulation, and an important link in creating an effectively data-oriented way of articulating different stake-holder concerns. The proposed solution is informed by requirements elicited within domain experts and sustainability targets that food-producing companies currently must adhere to.