The Fuzzy Cognitive Map–Based Shelf-life Modelling for Food Storage

Aegle marmelos is a sacred fruit with several medicinal properties, though availability is limited in a certain period of the year. It is therefore preserved in the form of leather through dehydration. In total, 16 concepts or nodes were selected after an interview with 27 stakeholders from different segments of food industries (packaging technology, food safety, certified industry auditor, food chemist, experienced sensory evaluation panellists, and food industry stakeholders) and a thorough review of shelf-life determining factors for leather-like products. Linguistic variables were assigned to find the rules governing the proposed model. The centre of gravity method was employed to defuzzify the linguistic variables with triangular membership function. A fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) was constructed with 106 numbers of connections to study the uncertainties in shelf-life modelling. Steady-state FCM analysis was conducted with considering the value of each concept equal to 1. Dynamic-state FCM was conducted considering the moisture content and moisture permeability with 0.1 as a case example. Different dynamic state infers how the shelf life of the leather product be influenced by different concepts/nodes/issues in comparison to steady-state FCM. FCM modelling is feasible for storage study of any type of food, though in this study bael leather is chosen.