Juan Ignacio Latorre-Biel, lecturer at the Public University of Navarre, has received the prize for the best scientific contribution during the 2nd International Food Operations & Processing Simulation Workshop, FoodOPS, held in Larnaca, Cyprus. The award-winning work proposes an innovative methodology in the agri-food sector based on a mathematical model that assists in decision-making at a facility devoted to the cultivation and production of the common mushroom.
This methodology means that the consumption of resources and emissions can be reduced and the productivity of an agri-food facility improved. The authors of the article, published in the proceedings of the international congress, have developed a mathematical model using a specific tool (Petri nets). They thus propose an optimisation process to find, in a model that manages crops of this type, the best solution for the variables introduced, such as the dimensions of the cultivation facilities, the amounts of raw materials used, the parameters and the duration of the various production phases or the rate of equipment use.
The international workshop in which this work was recognised was held within the framework of the 13th International Multidisciplinary Modelling & Simulation Multiconference, I3M 2016, which every year brings together scientists from across the world and whose lines of research focus on modelling and simulation and the including of them as a tool. Both disciplines are based on mathematical and computing models to describe systems and their behaviour. The contributions at this 13M Congress, also held in the Cypriot city, are developed in a huge range of fields such as the food industry, industrial manufacturing, multimodal and maritime logistics, industrial automation, defence and security, healthcare, energy and sustainable development, among others.
Latorre, who belongs to the Department of Mechanical, Energy and Materials Engineering, is the lead author of this work, in which another five researchers from the University of La Rioja participated (Julio Blanco-Fernández, Emilio Jiménez-Macías, Francisco Javier Leiva-Lázaro, Eduardo Martínez-Cámara and Mercedes Pérez de la Parte).
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