Biotech: a real-time application of artificial intelligence for fermentation processes

Abstract The purpose of this work was to exploit the main features and the advantages of qualitative physics. The influences among the process variables were modelled with the help of a causal graph, using qualitative operators. The reasoning about the standard state retraced the causal path explaining the observed behaviors according to the trends of the observable variables. Conflict situations could be solved using temporal notions. Those concepts were tailored to fermentation processes. An on-line Expert System (650 rules) has been built with the aim of deriving the behavior of the process.