IT for food

Description

The food industry is striving to adopt Information and Communication Technologies to improve its productivity and competitiveness. More specifically, meat-processing companies want to improve product quality by controlling, monitoring and optimizing production processes.

The IIiA is conducting research on several lines which will improve the way ICTs are applied to food companies:

• Application of image pickup devices in order to assess the quality of meat products in a non-invasive way. They are also used to monitor processes like meat salting.

• Modelling of biological systems and their application to the meat-processing industry. The IIiA is working on systematic methods and tools for inference, real-time monitoring, optimization and feedback control. Special emphasis is put on studying how to deal with uncertainty in production processes resulting from lack of data.

• Expert Supervision of processes in the meat-processing industry. Data collected from processes to produce stuffed meat products is analysed in order to improve their quality.

The most relevant projects in this area include applications for monitoring, and control.