ISA Lecture held by Shai Barbut (University of Guelph, Canada)

Food Industry 4.0: Present and Future

The food processing industry has seen tremendous changes over the past century when most fresh and semi fresh products were produced and consumed locally. Today such products can be produced on the other side of the world and delivered to their destination, as new transportation and preservation means have been developed for mass scale production. Industry 4.0, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution, focuses heavily on interconnectivity, automation, machine learning, and real-time data. This marriage of manufacturing, physical production and operations with smart digital technology, machine learning, and big data is helping to make the industry more efficient, save resources and quickly react to the ever-changing situations (e.g., recent pandemic). In the presentation examples of introducing automation and robotics to replace repetitive manual labor in complicated operations, use of high-speed cameras to control air puffs to blow off foreign materials from granular foods, as well as remote diagnosis and control of machinery located thousands of km away will be presented. An integrated Industry 4.0 system used to plan, control, and process the delivery of high value, perishable fish caught in the North Sea to be consumed at a European restaurant will be presented. Emphasis will be also placed on communication via satellites and fuzzy logic technology to help connecting and optimizing the different segments of the system.