A Decision Support System to design modified atmosphere packaging for fresh produce based on a bipolar flexible querying approach

18 To design new packaging for fresh food, stakeholders of the food 19 chain express their needs and requirements, according to some goals 20 and objectives. These requirements can be gathered into two groups: 21 (i) fresh food related characteristics and (ii) packaging intrinsic charac22 teristics. Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAP) is an efficient way to 23 delay senescence and spoilage and thus to extend the very short shelf 24 life of respiring products such as fresh fruits and vegetables. Conse25 quently, packaging O2/CO2 permeabilities must fit the requirements 26 of fresh fruits and vegetable as predicted by virtual MAP simulating 27 tools. Beyond gas permeabilities, the choice of a packaging material 28 for fresh produce includes numerous other factors such as the cost, 29 availability, potential contaminants of raw materials, process ability, 30 waste management constraints, etc. For instance, the user may have 31 the following multi-criteria query for his/her product asking for a pack32 aging with optimal gas permeabilities that guarantee product quality 33 and optionally a transparent packaging material made from renew34 able resources with a cost for raw material less than 3 e/ kg. To 35 help stakeholders taking a rational decision based on the expressed 36 needs, a new multi-criteria Decision Support System (DSS) for design37 ing biodegradable packaging for fresh produce has been built. In this 38 paper we present the functional specification, the software architecture 39 and the implementation of the developed tool. This tool includes (i) 40 a MAP simulation module combining mass transfer models and respi41