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Abstract

Food industries have to face competitiveness stakes on products quality and sustainability. The goal of this project is to build decision support tools for better managing product quality and, by the way, manufacturing processes. Causal relationships between on the one hand, ingredients, physico-chemical, microbiological characteristics and on the other hand, sensory, nutritional properties, depending on successive process operations are still ill-known in some food technologies.The uncertainty of the processes is to be reduced by developing or adapting innovative concepts, expertise and methodological tools. The scientific challenge is the understanding and modelling of the whole network of interacting entities taking place between the different levels of the processes. how micro level properties determine or at least influence those on the macro level ? Our project aims at reconstructing this puzzle of knowledge as to explain the global behaviour of the system. In this idea we propose to develop a new conceptual framework as to help to integrate, bring in synergy, unified the fragmented knowledge. The approaches developed, shall have to deal with different type of knowledge in a multimodal context (know-how of operator-experts in terms of formal or informal reasoning, scientific explanation and modelling of the phenomenon, data basis) Among the fragmented knowledge available at present, the know-how of the operator-experts is probably a key that should be taken into account. We propose in this context an interdisciplinary approach that involves the understanding and the reconstruction of the multilevel dynamics that are responsible for the phenomena they describe and the managing of these dynamics. The inherent uncertainty on the global laws of the system will be taken into account. The project will be focus on two complementary fields of research: (1) integrate the knowledge for the reconstruction of the multilevel dynamics and for reduce or deal with our uncertainty on the whole paths taken by a product during processing. (2) integrate the knowledge as to manage those paths. As to treat this problematic, we propose an approach coupling the reconstruction of the multilevel dynamics of the process to the viability theory. The reconstruction of the dynamics will be achieved using stochastic approaches bounded by the expert knowledge. It will be applied on two typical food technologies which are representative of the complexity of the food technology, cheese ripening and the bread making process. For this project, we have created an interdisciplinary team crucial for the success of the research. It associated fundamental laboratories (CREA, INRIA, LIP6) which can propose original mathematical and cognitive concepts, specialized laboratories (INRA) and technical centres (ITFF, INBP) performing research on the food technologies selected. It is organized as to maintain all along the steps of the work a strong cohesion and cooperation between the mathematicians and the teams working on the applications. As to improve the cooperation between the partners of INCALIN, we also propose to create a research platform supported by the Institute of complex systems of Paris Ile de France, common support for creation and exchange for all the partners of the project.


Mots-clés : Intégration des connaissances, théorie de la viabilité, qualité alimentaire, reconstruction stochastique des dynamiques, évolution artificielle

Key words : Knowledge integration, viability theory, food quality, stochastic reconstruction of the dynamics, artificial evolution