DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS

Decision Support Systems

Table Of Contents

INTRODUCTION3

FOOD DESIGN SUPPORT SYSTEM5

Recipe6

Ingredients6

Microorganisms8

Pattern matching11

Incidence of microorganisms12

PROCESSES13

Temperature related unit operations14

Distribution chains15

EXAMPLES16

Milk production16

Spaghetti production20

POSSIBLE EXTENSIONS OF FDSS23

CONCLUSIONS26

REFERENCES28

Decision Support Systems

Introduction

Regional Variations are a franchise company that are offering opportunities for an extension to their operations along the South Coast of England, from Hampshire to Cornwall. They are a café and food take away company, offering mostly local dishes such as fish and chips, crepes and waffles, and other regional dishes such as pasties.

Food quality is the result of numerous factors such as physical, biochemical and microbiological characteristics. Rejection of a food on the basis of quality, is the result of decay in the widest sense of the word. Presence or growth of microorganisms often are major problems related to the quality of foods. Presence and growth of microorganisms are also important factors for food safety. Other factors that play a role in the determination of food safety and food quality are, for instance, the presence of chemicals or food foreign substances such as glass fragments. Decreased quality may have a large impact on credibility of food manufacturers and costs of food products (Jay, 2002; McMeekin et al., 2003 and Shapton and Shapton, 2001:12-20).

At the moment standard procedures are in use that assess and control possible deviations from safety standards. These procedures, such as Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) and the HACCP approach, are well known in food production. These procedures will be implemented more and more into food production, resulting in a better understanding of processes and connected possible problems or hazards (ICMSF, 2008; Jay, 2002 and Shapton and Shapton, 2001:69). However, in practice it proves very hard to actually control all possible hazards.

In predictive microbiology, the change in numbers of microorganisms in time can be estimated, given for example the pH, temperature, or water activity of a food. The models that are developed in predictive microbiology can be used to calculate microbial numbers given a specific food composition, a food manufacturing line, or a food distribution chain. In combination with the above mentioned procedures, predictive microbiology gives improved, quantitative insight into the food properties and processes that are of importance to the safety and quality of foods (McMeekin et al., 2003 and Zwietering et al., 2002:10).

The development of a computerised decision support system that simulates composition, production and distribution of foods is described in this paper. The computer system uses both mathematical models and expert knowledge of food technologists for the determination of the microbial numbers in foods. The decision support system can be used to find microorganisms that grow in a specific food and the extent to which growth takes place. The quality and safety of foods under production or distribution can therefore be predicted. The described system uses databases of an earlier developed system by Zwietering et al. (2002:11). This system, however calculates, the effect of processing and distribution and is able to determine shelf life of foods thus being the first step in a microbiological risk assessment ...