Sustainability in food industry: Towards a unified multi-objective decision making framework

摘要

The growth of world population, the associated societal challenges and regulations push the food industry to become more sustainable. Improvements are required on multiple aspects: sustainable use of resources, limiting environmental impact and competitiveness, while ensuring safe process operation, food quality and food safety. Existing food manufacturing sytstems are mainly designed to maximize the production without keeping other aspects of sustainability in mind. Model-based optimization techniques accounting for sustainability indicators can be used to improve the in these aspects. In addition, many sustainability measures exist related to one or more of the three sustainability pillars (society, environmental and economic). These sustainability measures are often conflicting, as optimizing one of these measures often worsens the performance of another measure. Hence, achieving sustainable operation can therefore be seen as a multi-objective problem. Many advanced techniques have been developed in different fields, but these do not find their way to food industry. Furthermore, a generic, standardized approach is missing. Therefore, there is a need for a unified framework that can be used for sustainable design, operation optimization and decision making in food industry. In this article, the current state of the art with respect to sustainability in food industry and multi-objective optimization are presented. In addition, software tools developed at KU Leuven/BioTeC+ are introduced in the frame of enabling a sustainable food process design and operation. To conclude a strategy for developing a multi-objective decision making framework has been proposed.