ICT and modelling methodologies for food safety and quality assurance in food production plants

In many food processing operations, product safety is still controlled by checking only the end product by microbiological and chemical methods. When unsafe food products are detected, part of the production has to be diverted and production process must be halted until the conditions causing unsafe product are diagnosed and eliminated. Fault diagnosis methods that can quickly identify the source causes that yield unsafe products would reduce the process down time and productivity loss. Monitoring and controlling processes are therefore crucial to ensure safety constraints, product quality, environment constraints and minimum cost simultaneously. Aim of this paper is to present a novel approach for modelling and monitoring an industrial food process to be used for detecting abnormal behaviour of the process.