Computer-aided food processes for control engineering

The objective of the CAFE project is to provide new paradigms for the smart control of food processes, on the basis of four typical processes in the areas of bioconversion, separation, preservation and structuring. The novelty of the project lies in the capacity of combining PAT and sensing devices with models and simulation environment with the following objectives : (1) to extract as much as possible information from the process/plant in the form of precise estimations of unmeasured variables defining, in particular, product quality, and of physical parameters changing as the process dynamics does or difficult to know beforehand; (2) to save and encode in a reliable and usable way, basically via physical/deterministic models; and (3) to develop control methods to keep uniform quality and production despite the variability in the raw material and/or to respond to sudden changes in the demand.