Guest editorial for the International Journal of Food Engineering: “Selected Papers from the Workshop on Modelling and Simulation of Food Processing and Operations of the MAS 2012 Conference (Wien, September 19–21, 2012)”

Companies operating in food sector often face problems that are not commonly seen in other industrial fields. Main difficulties are related to the need to manage the flow of raw materials and final products, whose quality and characteristics can be significantly affected by environmental conditions, storage time or temperature. Hence, supply, stocking, manufacturing and distribution activities have to be strictly coordinated and managed, in such a way as to guarantee, among other, high quality standards, customer needs fulfilment, shelf-life tolerance, traceability, and cost and energy savings. Modelling and simulation can be exploited as useful approaches for process design and operations management in the food industry supply chain, and offer potential to solve several critical issues in that field. Both numerical and discrete event simulations are used in the food industry to solve different issues: (i) numerical and in particular Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation has been used to increase the potential of the equipment design or processing (Norton and Sun, 2006), exploiting also the fast evolution of the computer performance; (ii) discrete event simulation, instead, has been more frequently used in the food supply chain, with the aim to solve the logistic issues of food perishable good (Van Der Vorst et al., 2000; Van Der Vorst et al., 2009), or to design complex industrial plants composed of several food processes (Mosqueda et al., 2009). Overall, works on modelling and simulation are very frequent in the food field, being their role important to predict the behaviours of food systems, allowing also to reduce the number of the experimental tests. On the basis of the premise above, this special issue collects the best papers presented at the international workshop on “Modeling and Simulation of Food Processing and Operations”, held in Wien (Austria), on September 19-21, 2012, during the Modeling and Applied Simulation (MAS) 2012 conference. The workshop gave the possibility to present the up-to-date results achieved by applying modelling and simulation to the food industry. Therefore, our aim with this special issue is to propose the highest-quality contributions related to that research field. Overall, the MAS 2012 conference received numerous submissions, with more than 50 papers included in the conference proceedings; among those papers, approx. 10 were considered for this special issue. After review, 7 papers were accepted for publication. The papers we present in this special issue cover a wide range of topics related to simulation and modelling in the food industry. In the first paper, Bruzzone and Longo propose an advanced java-based simulation tool, whose purpose is to support decision making in a manufacturing system operating in the hazelnuts industry sector. By providing the user with high flexibility in terms of manufacturing scenarios definition, the simulation tool can be used as an advanced decision making tool to understand the dynamic interactions between multiple performance measures (including both production lines and inventory system performances) and a set of user-defined factors (the latter defined by the production manager according to his/her needs in terms of manufacturing scenarios investigation). De Lucca et al. apply dynamic simulation to explore the operating conditions of a packed batch distillation column for reducing the relative concentration of methanol in the distillate. The authors studied different cooling rate trajectories of the partial condenser, and its impact on the reflux and distillate rates. Their results showed that higher cooling rates and smaller cut times achieved lower relative concentrations of methanol in the distillate. Latorre-Biel et al. propose a new methodology, supported by artificial intelligence, for decision making in the farming field, and specifically to improve the management of the operation and redesign of traditional companies in the wine sector in the region of La Rioja (Spain). Rego Monteil et al. propose a simulation model of the plant and the human tasks, for process improvement in a fish processing factory ship. The authors combine discrete event simulation, for the analysis of the production system and experiment with operational rules, with digital human modelling, to analyse the present ergonomic conditions on the manual operations of the factory ship, and to propose alternative workstation designs that could lead to effective and ergonomic improvement. Casoli and Copelli analyse, through a 3D CFD model, an apparatus for the sterilization of tomato concentrate, in order to optimize the exchanger performance in term of temperature distribution inside the product. They found that the model is effective to understand the effects of process parameters on the behaviour of the condensing steam and obtain better performance of the exchanger in terms of temperature distribution of the threated product. A similar methodology is exploited by Solari et al., whose work focuses on discontinuous (batch) vertical fluid mixing systems for food fluids with particles. In their paper, the authors analyse, through CFD simulation, different mixer designs, and derive some key performance indicators to assess the effectiveness of the mixing process. They finally apply ANOVA and residual analysis to assess the significance of the influence of each input parameter (i.e., position of the rotor, fluid viscosity, and aspect ratio), on the individual KPIs and on the global performance of the mixer. Finally, in the last paper, Vignali et al. develop a CFD model to analyse and predict the thermal pasteurization process for two types of fresh pasta, i.e., “ravioli” filled of meat and “orecchiette”, without filling. CFD simulations are performed in a transient state, to evaluate the pasteurization temperature and the P-value reached on the surface of the orecchiette and at the core of the ravioli, as a function of the process time. The whole study is grounded on a real pasteuriser, where the heat exchange takes place by means of water vapour at approx. 371 K. Thanks to the variety of topics addressed, we believe that this special issue provides the scientific community with valuable information and knowledge in the field of food processing, with a particular focus on the use of modelling and simulation for decision support in that field. Obviously, the value-added of a special issue is only as good as the contributions of the manuscripts it receives, and the quality of the feedback provided by its reviewers. We are therefore very grateful to all the authors, who supported this special issue through their contributions, and we are indebted to the reviewers, who helped us in managing the papers received in a timely manner and provided useful and professional reports about the papers. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the Editor in Chief of International Journal of Food Engineering, which gave us the possibility of organizing the special issue and helped us in its successful completion.