A Knowledge-Based System as a Sustainable Software Application for the Supervision and Intelligent Control of an Alcoholic Fermentation Process

One goal of specialists in food processing is to increase production efficiency in accordance with sustainability by optimising the consumption of raw food materials, water, and energy. One way to achieve this purpose is to develop new methods for process monitoring and control. In the winemaking industry, there is a lack of procedures regarding the common work based on knowledge acquisition and intelligent control. In the present article, we developed and tested a knowledge-based system for the alcoholic fermentation process of white winemaking while considering the main phases: the latent phase, exponential growth phase, and decay phase. The automatic control of the white wine’s alcoholic fermentation process was designed as a system on three levels. Level zero represents the measurement and adjustment loops of the bioreactor. At the first level of control, the three phases of the process are detected functions of the characteristics of the fermentation medium (the initial substrate concentration, the nitrogen assimilable content, and the initial concentration of biomass) and, thus, functions on the phase’s duration. The second level achieves the sequence supervision of the process (the operation sequence of a fermentation batch) and transforms the process into a continuous one. This control level ensures the quality of the process as well as its diagnosis. This software application can be extended to the industrial scale and can be improved by using further artificial intelligence techniques.