Computer Aided Process Engineering for Sustainability Analysis of Food Production

Abstract

We propose a dedicated tool that permits the evaluation of food production process sustainability, in particular virgin olive oil process. It is based on an integrated process-product-enterprise (P²E) approach that allows systematically taking into account sustainable issues within food production process design. The domain specific tool “&cOlive” is implemented as an Excel application. This CAPE based tool assesses sustainability of a future or an existing system of virgin olive oil production. In the first case, 28 configurations of the system may be chosen based on 7 agricultural scenarios and 4 industrial scenarios (extraction).These scenarios were built with field data directly collected through questionnaires and visits of olive oil producers in France, in the context of the European OiLCA project. Complementary data were provided by French experts from the Centre Technique de l’Olivier. They completed and reinforced the relevance and the quality of the model. Finally, commercial databases such as Ecoinvent for environmental LCA were used. The tool offers the opportunity to simulate a lot of scenarios and to study the influence of different extraction technologies and different operating parameters on sustainability.