Lect.No. 1 : Importance of computerization in food industry – Operating environments and information systems for various types of food industry.

Dr. S. Sridevy

Associate Professor (Computer Science)

Department of Physical Sciences & Information Technology

Agricultural Engineering College & Research Institute

Tamil Nadu Agricultural University

COM 103 – ICT Applications in Food Industry (1+2)

Importance of computerization in Food industry

• Now-a-days, the application of information and communications technology (ICT) in agriculture is becoming progressively more significant.
• Advantages favouring application of computer vision to engineering problems are
• Quickness
• Easy procedures for application
• Quantum of output per unit time
• Application of computer vision to food processing fields evolved first in 1989 for grain quality inspection

Strength of IT

• Strength of IT lies in collection, storage, processing, analyzing, retrieval and dissemination of information.
• Advantages of using IT tools:
• Speed and accuracy of data processing
• Large storage capacity of data or information
• Variety of tasks can be performed
• Automation of activities for example process control applications
• Reduction in cost in long run
• Reduced manpower requirement
• Better quality of work, improved customer image, management confidence, etc.
• Promoting informatics led resource planning and management
• Strengthening research, education, training, extension and development linkages
• Improved marketing of milk and milk products
• E-commerce for direct linkages between local producers, traders, retailers and suppliers

E-Agriculture

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• An emerging field focusing on the enhancement of agricultural and rural development through improved information and communication processes.
• A global Community of Practice, where people from all over the world exchange information, ideas, and resources related to the use of ICT for sustainable agriculture and rural development.
• The food industry provides much of the food and food energy consumed by the world population.

Food Industry includes

• Regulation: local, regional, national, and international rules and regulations for food production and sale, including food quality, food safety, marketing/advertising, and industry lobbying activities
• Education and R&D: Food Science & Technology; academic, consultancy, vocational
• Financial services: credit, insurance
• Manufacturing: agrichemicals, agriculture farm machinery & supplies seed.
• Agriculture: raising of crops and livestock, and seafood
• Food processing: fresh products for market, and manufacture of prepared food products
• Marketing: promotion of generic products, new products, advertising, marketing campaigns, packaging, public relations, etc.
• Whole sale and distribution: logistics, transportation, warehousing, Foodservice, Grocery, Farmers'market, Public market and other Retailing FOOD

The use of computerized systems within the food processing industry regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

APPLICATIONS FOR COMPUTER IN AGRICULTURE / FOOD INDUSTRY

a) Expert System:

• It is a computer program that contains stored /expert knowledge and solves problems in a specific field or greater than human expert.
• Many expert systems have been developed for almost all sectors of agriculture
• Maintaining quality of dairy products
• Pest management
• Variety selection
• Soil preparation
• Disease diagnosis, etc

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b) Vision System:

• It is a field that includes methods for acquiring, processing, analyzing, and understanding images
• Computer vision has proven successful for the objective; online measurement of several food products with applications ranging from routine inspection to the complex vision guided robotic control
• This technique is used in many engineering fields
• Robotics
• Industrial image processing,
• Food processing and other fields.
• computer vision is concerned with the theory for building artificial systems that obtain information from images.

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c) Artificial Neural Networks(ANN):

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• ANN is an emerging IT tool in the area of artificial intelligence
• To develop tools capable of performing cognitive functions such as reasoning and learning.
• Creating a system to mimic the processing power of the human brain.
• Used by researchers to solve problems related to dairy and food processing worldwide and now in India.
• Used for pattern recognition aimed at characterization of food properties and for predicting quality deterioration during storage life of the products

Applications of ANN in dairy are:

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• Machine perception including machine vision, electronic tongue and electronic nose for sensory evaluation
• Spectral data interpretation for identification of functional groups and quantitative analysis
• Food Microbiology and Food Fermentation
• Predicting physical, chemical, and functional properties of food products during processing and distribution.
• Prediction of shelf life of dairy products based on sensory evaluation

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d) Fuzzy Logic:

• Used in food processing.
• Fuzzy logic differs from conventional logic
• Uses the mathematical theory of fuzzy sets simulates the process of normal human reasoning by allowing computer to behave less precisely and logically than conventional computers do.
• Fuzzy Logic is a powerful method for managing the properties of food and solve its problems such as single sensory property like
• color or texture, nonuniformity
• variability of raw materials, nonlinearity
• coupling of its variables continuous temperature
• moisture change during a heating or cooling process
• biochemical or microbial changes
• density
• thermal and electrical conductivity
• specific heat
• Examples: Television sets with automatic color control, anti-lock braking systems used on automobiles

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e) Robotics:

• Ensures quality and affordability.
• It drives down the costs of keeping the food fresh and increases productivity.
• It can help to eliminate safety issues for the more dangerous jobs in the food industry
• The food processing industry combines a wider variety of products, packaging types and handling variants
• In the meat industry, robots are used in cutting, sorting and packaging applications
• In cheese production they stir curds, transfer cheese moulds, and turn, cut, portion, package and palletise cheeses.
• Integrated sensors and measuring systems enable the simple implementation of complex processes.

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Conti…

• Robotics delivers efficient, flexible robotic systems for food packaging, palletising, depalletising or order picking
• It involves folding cardboard boxes, plastic boxes, plastic bags, sacks, laminated packaging, or bottles.
• They are taking on more “human” capabilities and traits such as sensing, memory, trainability, and object recognition.
• Processed foods are preserved longer, protected from dust, moisture, and micro-organisms.
• The advent of machineries, robotics, and automation technology has driven down the overall cost of processed food versus original food products

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Conti…

APPLICATION OF ROBOTS:

• Higher cost and lower productivity are leading towards increased application of robots in the food sector.
• Robotic system can pack meat and chocolates into the trays faster.
• FANUC robotics, Inc. has developed several models of pick-and-place articulated robot for the food industry that meet hygiene requirements.
• The robot comprises of several arms called kinematic chains linking their base to mobile parts.
• Some robotic system can handle 300 parts a minute

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FANUC robotics

Conti…

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NEED FOR AUTOMATION:

1. Improved Productivity
• Plant productivity may be defined as the quantity of end products manufactured per unit of operating parameters – plant size, number of workers, time of operation, etc.
• It is directly related to how efficiently the input resources are utilized in translating them into marketable end products.
• This is possible because automation allows for efficient scheduling of work flow and labor use.
2. Improved Product Quality
• The increased awareness and sophistication of consumers have created the expectation for improved quality in consumer food products.
• Quality assurance methods used in the food industry have traditionally involved human visual inspection. Such methods are tedious, laborious, time-consuming, and inconsistent.
• Necessary for the food industry to employ automatic methods for quality assurance and quality control.

3. Improved Profitability
• Automation helps to improve productivity and product quality. Both of these contribute directly to improved profitability.
• Profitability may be improved by increasing yields, lowering input costs, enhancing crop quality and lowering production risk.

Software in Food Industry

• Spreadsheet
• A computer programme which allows the manipulation of tabular numerical data and databases such as Microsoft Excel, and which can also easily generate useful charts.
• Spreadsheet applications:
• Data interpretation and solving problems
• preparation of charts
• use of macros to solve engineering problems
• use of add‐ins, use of solver

Application of MS Excel to solve the problems of Food Technology

a) Chemical kinetics in food processing:

- Determining rate constant of zero order reaction

- First order rate constant and half life of reactions

• Determining energy of activation of vitamin degradation during food

storage

- Rates of Enzymes catalyzed reaction

b) Microbial distraction in thermal processing of food

- Determining decimal reduction time from microbial survival data

- Thermal resistance factor, Z-values in thermal processing of food

- Sampling to ensure that a lot is not contaminated with more than a given percentage

c) Statistical quality control -

• Probability of occurrence in normal distribution

- Using binomial distribution to determine probability of occurrence

- Probability of defective items in a sample obtained from large lot

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Conti..

• GAMBIT software (Geometry And Mesh Building Intelligent Tool)
• GAMBIT is a software package designed to help analysts and designers build and mesh models for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and other scientific applications
• To analysis the fluid flow problems and the branch of science for this problem is known as Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) 
• Geometry creation (specifies the domain of fluid flow problem). It can even model 1D, 2D and 3D domain.
• Mesh generation (discretization of domain to solve governing equations at each cell) which allows solving every governing equation at each node created in mesh.
• FLUENT software
• FLUENT are tools to analysis the fluid flow problems  
• This software solves/iterate the problem by importing the file which was exported by GAMBIT to define the problem in FLUENT.
• It contains various options to cover all sort of problems starting from simple fluid flow problem to complex fluid-structural interaction (FSI).

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Conti..

• LabVIEW software (Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench)
• LabVIEW is a Graphical programming language that allows for instrument control, data acquisition, and pre/post processing of acquired data

Data Acquisition

• Traditional Experiments – signals from sensors are sent to analog or digital meters, read by the experimenter, and recorded by hand
• In automated data acquisition systems the sensors transmit a voltage or current signal directly to a computer via a data acquisition board.
• Software such as LabVIEW controls the acquisition and processing of such data
• The benefits of automated systems are many:
• Improved accuracy of recording
• Increased frequency with which measurements can be taken
• To automate pre and post processing and build in quality control

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Example

Enterprise Resource Planner (ERP) applications at Amul dairy

• Amul dairy is the largest dairy cooperative society in India with collection of 6 million liters of milk per day from about 10,600 separate village cooperative societies which have approximately 2.1 million milk producing members.
• To manage such a large network of societies and members is great challenge so as efficiently to improve the system for:
• Weighing of milk and determination of fat and SNF contents
•  Calculation of the purchase price
• Timely payment to milk producers without loss of much time to test the milk and work out the purchase price.

Conti…

• Thus the management, in consultation with Tata Consultancy Services implemented Enterprise Resource Planner (ERP) as solution to keep pace with dynamically changing business environment. The project was named as Enterprise wise Integrated Application System (EIAS). This include following IT related actions:
• Automatic Milk Collection System Units (AMCUS) at village societies have been installed in the first phase to automate milk producers logistics
• AMCSU  facilitates  the  capture  of  member information, milk fat content, volume  collected  and   amount  payable  to  each member
• Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad developed and provided an application software Dairy Information System Kiosk (DISK) to facilitate data analysis and decision support in improving milk collection
• DISK contains a database on the history of cattle owned by the farmers, medical history of these cattle, reproductive cycle and history of diseases
• The system can be used to forecast milk collection and monitor the produce from individual sellers.

Thank You