CHAPTER ONEINTRODUCTION1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDYProcess industries in general face a continuous drive to improve their operations. This drive is enforced by global competition, (environmental) regulation and consumer demands (e.g. Mittal (2001)). A contribution to the improvement of the operations can be achieved by implementing an improved control strategy in the process aiming at increased productivity and flexibility in operations (Trystram and Courtois (2003) and decrease of product loss, increase of product quality and its regularity. Also more cost efficient operation is an important motivation for the implementation of a new control strategy. Currently, in process operations one usually measures the different process variables, such as temperature, humidity, pressure and flows, quite frequently. This allows for tight control of these process variables. The set points are determined o-line in advance and are usually constant, or, at best, manually adjusted as conditions change out of the normal. In contrast, quality variables, which are the key indictors for the performance of the overall process, are measured o-line, if measured at all, but are usually rather slow. Thus their use in control applications introduces time delays and periods where the process is not operating on specifications (Chen et al. (2003).However, improvement of process operations with respect to product quality requirements can only be achieved by combining knowledge about both the product and the process, as e.g. for drying operation is concluded by Kerkhof (2000). This motivates the development of a control methodology that can be used to determine the most appropriate control strategy for a specific process operation. Although its results may be used to improve process operations in other industries, this thesis focuses on food processing and then especially on the class of climate controlled operations.If a product fulfils the customer’s expectations, the customer will be pleased and consider that the product is of acceptable or even high quality. If his or her expectations are not fulfilled, the customer will consider that the product is of low quality. This means that the quality of a product may be defined as “its ability to fulfil the customer’s needs and expectations”. Quality needs to be defined firstly in terms of parameters or characteristics, which vary from product to product. For example, for a mechanical or electronic product these are performance, reliability, safety and appearance. For pharmaceutical products, parameters such as physical and chemical characteristics, medicinal effect, toxicity, taste and shelf life may be important. For a food product they will include taste, nutritional properties, texture, shelf life and so on.

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