Closed-loop strategies to locally simulate food shipment conditions

Food specialities, fresh food and high quality produces are known as critic products to store and to deliver. The physical and environmental conditions, i.e. temperature, humidity, light and mechanical shocks, etc., experienced through the whole supply chain can affect the safety, quality and conservation conditions causing significant losses of the product value, mining their safe and healthy final consumption. Several studies investigate, from an experimental view-point, the trends of critic qualitative and quantitative product parameters drawing conclusions about the most effective shipment and storage strategies. Such applications are based on differential laboratory analyses and tests comparing stressed and non-stressed samples of product. The availability of reliable stressed samples, similar to the product state at the place of consumption, is essential and represents a basic condition to draw effective conclusions. This study investigates and compares two strategies to be adopted during the laboratory simulation reproducing the product shipment conditions. Such strategies look for the closed-loop control of the product temperature and humidity levels. The theoretic background and the strategy implementation through a real-time LabViewTM interface are discussed and their performances are preliminary assessed through a realistic simulation based on the shipment of an Italian food specialty. The gap between the set-point and the measured profile provides the accuracy of the proposed strategies.