A Decision Support System to design modified atmosphere packaging for fresh produce based on a bipolar flexible querying approach

UMR IATE Axe 3 : Transferts de matière et réactions dans les systèmes aliment/emballage UMR IATE Axe 5 : Application intégrée de la connaissance, de l’information et des technologies permettant d’accroître la qualité et la sécurité des alimentsInternational audienceTo design new packaging for fresh food, stakeholders of the food chain express their needs and requirements, according to some goals and objectives. These requirements can be gathered into two groups: (i) fresh food related characteristics and (ii) packaging intrinsic characteristics. Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAP) is an efficient way to delay senescence and spoilage and thus to extend the very short shelf life of respiring products such as fresh fruits and vegetables. Consequently, packaging O2/CO2 permeabilities must fit the requirements of fresh fruits and vegetable as predicted by virtual MAP simulating tools. Beyond gas permeabilities, the choice of a packaging material for fresh produce includes numerous other factors such as the cost, availability, potential contaminants of raw materials, process ability, waste management constraints, etc. For instance, the user may have the following multi-criteria query for his/her product asking for a packaging with optimal gas permeabilities that guarantee product quality and optionally a transparent packaging material made from renewable resources with a cost for raw material less than 3 e/ kg. To help stakeholders taking a rational decision based on the expressed needs, a new multi-criteria Decision Support System (DSS) for designing biodegradable packaging for fresh produce has been built. In this paper we present the functional specification, the software architecture and the implementation of the developed tool. This tool includes (i) a MAP simulation module combining mass transfer models and respiration of the food, (ii) a multi-criteria flexible querying module which handles imprecise, uncertain and missing data stored in the database. We detail its operational functioning through a real life case study to determine the most satisfactory materials for apricots packaging

A Decision Support System to design modified atmosphere packaging for fresh produce based on a bipolar flexible querying approach

UMR IATE Axe 3 : Transferts de matière et réactions dans les systèmes aliment/emballage UMR IATE Axe 5 : Application intégrée de la connaissance, de l’information et des technologies permettant d’accroître la qualité et la sécurité des alimentsInternational audienceTo design new packaging for fresh food, stakeholders of the food chain express their needs and requirements, according to some goals and objectives. These requirements can be gathered into two groups: (i) fresh food related characteristics and (ii) packaging intrinsic characteristics. Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAP) is an efficient way to delay senescence and spoilage and thus to extend the very short shelf life of respiring products such as fresh fruits and vegetables. Consequently, packaging O2/CO2 permeabilities must fit the requirements of fresh fruits and vegetable as predicted by virtual MAP simulating tools. Beyond gas permeabilities, the choice of a packaging material for fresh produce includes numerous other factors such as the cost, availability, potential contaminants of raw materials, process ability, waste management constraints, etc. For instance, the user may have the following multi-criteria query for his/her product asking for a packaging with optimal gas permeabilities that guarantee product quality and optionally a transparent packaging material made from renewable resources with a cost for raw material less than 3 e/ kg. To help stakeholders taking a rational decision based on the expressed needs, a new multi-criteria Decision Support System (DSS) for designing biodegradable packaging for fresh produce has been built. In this paper we present the functional specification, the software architecture and the implementation of the developed tool. This tool includes (i) a MAP simulation module combining mass transfer models and respiration of the food, (ii) a multi-criteria flexible querying module which handles imprecise, uncertain and missing data stored in the database. We detail its operational functioning through a real life case study to determine the most satisfactory materials for apricots packaging

A Food Packaging Use Case for Argumentation

International audienceWithin the framework of the European project EcoBioCap (ECOefficient BIOdegradable Composite Advanced Packaging), aiming at conceiving the next generation of food packagings, we introduce an argumentation-based tool for management of conflicting viewpoints between preferences expressed by the involved parties (food and packaging industries, health and waste management authorities, consumers, etc.). In this paper we recall briefly the principles underlying the reasoning process, and we detail the main functionalities and the architecture of the argumentation tool covering the overall reasoning steps starting from formal representation of text arguments and ending by extraction of justified preferences. Finally, we detail its operational functioning through a real life case study to determine the justifiable choices between recyclable, compostable and biodegradable packaging materials based on stakeholders’ arguments

Metamodeling approach to preference management in the semantic Web

2008 AAAI Workshop; Chicago, IL; United States; 13 July 2008 through 14 July 2008Preference is a superiority state to determine the preferable or the superior of one entity, property or constraint to another from a specified selection set. Preference issue is heavily studied in Semantic Web research area. The existing preference management approaches only consider the importance of concepts for capturing users' interests. This paper presents a metamodeling approach to preference management. Preference meta model consists of concepts and semantic relations to represent users' interests. Users may have the same type preferences in different domains. Thus, metamodeling must be used to define similar preferences for interoperability in different domains. In this paper, preference meta model defines a general storage structure to manage different types of preferences for personalized applications. Copyright © 2008, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

Aspects of dealing with imperfect data in temporal databases

In reality, some objects or concepts have properties with a time-variant or time-related nature. Modelling these kinds of objects or concepts in a (relational) database schema is possible, but time-variant and time-related attributes have an impact on the consistency of the entire database. Therefore, temporal database models have been proposed to deal with this. Time itself can be at the source of imprecision, vagueness and uncertainty, since existing time measuring devices are inherently imperfect. Accordingly, human beings manage time using temporal indications and temporal notions, which may contain imprecision, vagueness and uncertainty. However, the imperfection in human-used temporal indications is supported by human interpretation, whereas information systems need extraordinary support for this. Several proposals for dealing with such imperfections when modelling temporal aspects exist. Some of these proposals consider the basis of the system to be the conversion of the specificity of temporal notions between used temporal expressions. Other proposals consider the temporal indications in the used temporal expressions to be the source of imperfection. In this chapter, an overview is given, concerning the basic concepts and issues related to the modelling of time as such or in (relational) database models and the imperfections that may arise during or as a result of this modelling. Next to this, a novel and currently researched technique for handling some of these imperfections is presented

Enriching queries using argumentation: an industrial application of argumentation

DemonstrationInternational audienceWithin the framework of the European project EcoBioCap (ECOefficient BIOdegradable Composite Advanced Packaging), aiming at conceiving the next generation of food packagings, we introduce an argumentation-based tool for management of conflicting viewpoints between preferences expressed by the involved parties (food and packaging industries, health and waste management etc.). The requirements and user preferences are modeled by several ontological rules provided by the stakeholders expressing their viewpoints and expertise. The argumentation tool implements the process which has been introduced in previous work [10,11] combining a description logic (DLR-Lite) within ASPIC framework for relational database querying purposes. In this paper, we recall briefly the principles underlying the reasoning process, and we detail the main functional- ities and the architecture of the argumentation tool covering the overall reasoning steps starting from formal representation of text arguments and ending by extraction of justified preferences. Finally, we detail its operational functioning through a real life case study to determine the justifiable choices between recyclable, com- postable and biodegradable packaging materials based on stakeholders’ arguments

Conflicting viewpoint relational database querying: an argumentation approach

International audienceWithin the framework of the European project EcoBioCap, we model a real world use case aiming at conceiving the next generation of food packagings. The objective is to select packaging materials according to possibly conflicting requirements expressed by the involved parties (food and packaging industries, health authorities, consumers, waste management authority, etc.). The requirements and user preferences are modeled by several ontological rules provided by the stakeholders expressing their viewpoints and expertise. Since several aspects need to be considered (CO2 and O2 permeance, interaction with the product, sanitary, cost, end of life, etc.) in order to select objects, an argumentation process can be used to express/reason about different aspects or criteria describing the packagings. We define then in this paper an argumentation approach which combines a description logic (DLR-Lite) within ASPIC framework for relational database querying. The argumentation step is finally used to express and/or enrich a bipolar query employed for packaging selection

Soft computing agents for e-health applied to the research and control of unknown diseases

This paper presents an Ontology-based Holonic Diagnostic System (OHDS) that combines the advantages of the holonic paradigm with multi-agent system technology and ontology design, for the organization of unstructured biomedical research into structured disease information. We use ontologies as 'brain' for the holonic diagnostic system to enhance its ability to structure information in a meaningful way and share information fast. To integrate dispersed heterogeneous knowledge available on the web we use a fuzzy mechanism ruled by intelligent agents, which automatically structures the information in the adequate ontology template. Our vision of how this system implementation should be backed by a solid security shield that ensures the privacy and safety of medical information concludes the paper