Expert Knowledge-Based System for Shelf-Life Analysis of Dairy Cheese Ball (Rasgulla).

Dairy cheese ball (Rasgulla) is one of the most commercially acclaimed dairy-based sweetmeat products in the Indian subcontinent. The main constrain with rasgulla export is the prediction of its shelf-life period, as there are several factors upon which the perishability of the product is dependent. Twenty-five nodes or concepts were chosen after a thorough consultation with 36 numbers of experts and stakeholders sweetmeat producers, shopkeepers, chhana producers, experts from packaging industries and an experienced tasting panel. The proposed fuzzy cognitive model (FCM) was constructed based on the linguistic variables assigned by the experts. For the defuzzification process centre of gravity, the method was used. There were 137 numbers of interconnections (within the 25 concepts) to build the FCM-based shelf-life model. Steady-state and dynamic-state FCM analysis was done considering the values of each concept to 1 and 0.01 respectively. The two most influential concepts namely freshness of chhana and moisture content were assigned to 0.01 for a better understanding of the rasgulla shelf life with varying values of the concepts. The major challenge related with the application of FCM in food science or food processing is the validation of the proposed model. In this paper, a validation scheme has been proposed to overcome this challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]