Achieving quality assurance functionality in the food industry using a hybrid case-based reasoning and fuzzy logic approach

Quality control of food inventories in the warehouse is complex as well as challenging due to the fact that food can easily deteriorate. Currently, this difficult storage problem is managed mostly by using a human dependent quality assurance and decision making process. This has however, occasionally led to unimaginative, arduous and inconsistent decisions due to the injection of subjective human intervention into the process. Therefore, it could be said that current practice is not powerful enough to support high-quality inventory management. In this paper, the development of an integrative prototype decision support system, namely, Intelligent Food Quality Assurance System (IFQAS) is described which will assist the process by automating the human based decision making process in the quality control of food storage. The system, which is composed of a Case-based Reasoning (CBR) engine and a Fuzzy rule-based Reasoning (FBR) engine, starts with the receipt of incoming food inventory. With the CBR engine, certain quality assurance operations can be suggested based on the attributes of the food received. Further of this, the FBR engine can make suggestions on the optimal storage conditions of inventory by systematically evaluating the food conditions when the food is receiving. With the assistance of the system, a holistic monitoring in quality control of the receiving operations and the storage conditions of the food in the warehouse can be performed. It provides consistent and systematic Quality Assurance Guidelines for quality control which leads to improvement in the level of customer satisfaction and minimization of the defective rate. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.