The design of food processing systems for improved responsiveness and late customisation

in designing food manufacturing systems, it is important to have design models to help increase understanding and to predict the behaviour of proposed processes. However, understanding of the properties of the relevant food materials may be limited and the underlying relationships are often highly non-linear. When coupled with models of the manufacturing system itself, the sensitivities of the various design parameters can be very different. Constraint modelling is a technique that has been used successfully in the design of machine systems. Here it is applied to create an initial model of a yoghurt processing line. The approach is to identify the constraints which bound the application and then to use optimisation techniques to resolve these.