Neural Networks for Modeling and Identification of the Dough Rising Process inside an Industrial Proofiing Chamber.

M. Fravolini, A. Ferroni, A. Ficola, M. La Cava Istituto di Elettronica - UniversitB di Perugia Via Duranti 1/Al - 1-0613 1 S. Lucia Canetola - Perugia (Italy) Tel: +39-75-5852682 Fax: +39-75-5852654 e-mail: fravolin@istel.ing.unipg.id

Aibstract. The main problem we meet with when we want to preview and control the quality of the yeast leavened bakery foods is the lack of operative models able to relate the dough rising process with the environmental conditions inside the proofing chamber. In this work we propose a methodology which relates easily measurable temperatures inside the proofing chamber with the height of thie rising dough inside a closed mould. The proposed modlels are identified by means of neural networks and linear ARX systems. The identification has been carried out using of measurements carried out both on the industrial plant and in a small laboratory climatic chamber. The good fit of the results shows that the proposed architecture is well suited for the considered plant.

1. Introduction
The industrial production of yeast leavened food is one of the most widespread industrial process all over the worlld. This process is carried out by a series of well defined working phases. After mixing the recipe ingredients with a mixing machinery, the product is kneaded, partitioned and shaped in loaves, which are subsequently inserted inside a proofing chamber. Once the desired volume is achieved by the dough, the proofing is stopped introducing the product into the oven for cooking; the 'last phases are conditioning and, for some productions, cutting and toasting. In a continuous production plant all these processes are linked together to generate a complex processing line. An efficient conduction of such a plant must be able to guarantee both high quality products and few production discards. In order to achieve these results, careful control of Ihe product quality in each working phase must be effected. It is well known that the most critical phase of such a process is represented by the proofing process inside the proofing chamber. During this phase the CO2

generated inside the dough causes the product to rise and a porous structure is created. A bad proofing phase can generate a lack of quality of the final product. For each kind of recipe many factors influence the proofing process: temperature and humidity, proofing time, quality and quantity of yeast, etc.. For a large class of industrial productions proofing takes place inside closed metallic moulds, carried by a conveyor belt inside the proofing chamber, where both temperature and humidity are controlled. A rich literature exists about the proofing process and proofing chambers testifying to a great research interest. Pinter [ 11, Maklyukov and Puchkova [2] and Yurchak and Kishen'ko [3] have extensively studied the determination of the relations between the porosity of the finished bread and the values of temperature, humidity and proofing time. They derived a set of regression equations which can determine optimum set-points. Dixon and Kell [4] and Kuzrietsov and Vasin [5] have investigated how the temperature and the humidity inside the proofing chamber influence the rate of formation of CO2 and the rheological characteristics of the loaf. Chernikh and Puchkova [6] proposed to measure the porosity by means of the cooling rate o f a proofing dough subjected to a pulse of electrical heating. All these models have been developed on the base of measurements carried out in a laboratory chamber, in which environmental variables are easily controllable and measurable with high precision; moreover, no appreciable external disturbances exist. Firom an industrial point of view, it is not easy to regulate the temperature and humidity of each zone of the proofing chamber to a prescribed set point value, because of environmental disturbances. The most important disturbances are seasonal and daily temperature variations inslcle the factory and the initial mean temperature of the metallic moulds inside which dough proofing takes place. These disturbances, even if of small amplitude, can

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generate unacceptable variations in the final volume, affecting the overall quality of the final product. To reduce the effects of the disturbances a control scheme must be introduced. For this reason it is necessary to have an efficient model which relates the temperature and humidity fields inside the chamber (input variables) to the dough rising inside the moulds (output variable); in this way the daily and seasonal disturbances are directly accounted by measuring their effects. Since in real plants it is very difficult to get direct measures from the moving moulds, it is virtually impossible to apply an on-line feedback control based on measures on the leavening dough; moreover feedback control could be not effective; in fact, the time constants of the thermal exchange between air, mould and dough are of the same order of magnitude of the usual proofing times; besides, since the amplitude of the control input (the air temperature) must be bounded within certain values to avoid the irreversible inhibition of the biological process of leavening, the tracking of a temperature profile of the dough cannot be achieved. Currently, for lack of information on the on-line state of the rising dough, the control of this process is manually performed by a skilled operator, who, in order to reduce the effects of the disturbances, uses his experience and intuition varying the amount of yeast in the recipe and the residence time of the moulds inside the proofing room. The temperature of the chamber is usually set to a fixed value and no control is made on the temperature of the dough. The effects of any control action can be evaluated only at the end of the proofing process, when the moulds come outside the chamber. Such control strategy involves long time delays (some hours); therefore, the classic try and error correction scheme is very inefficient for continuous high production industrial plants. For these reasons a model which could predict the effect of the corrections on the final product would be very useful for the proofing operator, realizing a sort of predictive control.

In the present work we develop a model which describes the dough rising process inside the metallic moulds on the base of the temperatures field of the proofing chamber. The relations between these variables involve biochemical, mechanical and thermodynamic processes, which are non linear phenomena, hardly to be modeled by mathematical differential equations; therefore the model we propose has been developed using black box structures [8] implemented by means of neural networks and linear ARX blocks [9] [lo] [ l l ] .

2. Model structure
A model useful to achieve the predictive control for a such industrial process must be able to provide the correct rising of the volume of the dough inside the moulds (Fig.1) moving in the leavening room (Fig. 2); moreover it should use easily measurable input variables. The output variable which best characterize the quality of the product is the evolution of the volume of the dough [3]. The aim is to predict the effects of disturbances and of the control inputs (duration and yeast quantity) on the volume. The output variable Volume is mainly influenced by two groups of variables and disturbances: the dough composition and the environmental variables. In the first group there are involved the proportions of ingredients used in the recipe, the characteristics of the ingredients (for example the strength of the flour), the energy supplied during kneading, etc. During the production of a specific product the recipe and the kneading time are constant and the ingredients are strictly

Fig. 1 A mould with doughs.

[ x ( k ) , y(k) ] = coordinates of a mould

Trajectory of the moulds

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selected and controlled by means of laboratory analysis; for this reason we can suppose that it is sufficient to consider only a variable parameter of the first group: the quantity of yeast in the dough. A.bout the second group, literature reports that the environmental variables which influence the process are the relative humidity (RH) and the temperature of the dough [7]; however for productions in closed moulds, the RH inside them is slightly influenced by the RH of the chamber; in fact the RH inside the moulds quicky increases, reaching the saturation; this assumption has been verified measuring the RH by means of a data logger put inside a mould with and without doughs (Fig. 3).

............L ............ :.............:........... 50 ........... :............;

'$0 ......................................

i - ;
Di

............

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moulids; therefore the proposed architecture of the model (Fig.4) is based on two main blocks representing respectively the model of the leavening room and the mode:l of the fermentation process inside the closed moulds. The first block determines the time evolution of the temperature TM(k) of the mould depending on the temperature field evolution inside the leavening room and on thle speed of the moving mould itself; the temperature field is sampled by means of a certain number of fixed measurement points (eight in the considered case); the speed can be varied by the operator, defining the total residence time (t-res) of the mould inside the chamber. Besides, the evolution of TM(k) depends on the initial value: TMi of the temperature of the moulds. The second block provides the temporal evolution of the volume of the dough in function of the evolution of the mould temperature TM(k), the initial quantity of the yeast (Yeast), the initial temperature TDi and the initial volume Vo of the dough; the effective volume of a loaf cannot be easily measured, since volume and thickness are strictly related, we replace the volume with the measure of the thick.ness of the loaf itself. In all the subsequent considerations a sampling time of 30 seconds was considered as a good choice for the dynamics involved.

20 ...........
10

3. Model of the proofing chamber

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Fig. 3 Relative Umidity inside a mould with/without doughs.

The temperature field in the dough is determined by the mould temperature, which is related to the temperatures found by the mould during its trip inside the proofing chamber. In the industrial plant it is easier to get continuous measurement of temperatures in fixed points inside the room than to get directly the temperatures of the moving
TMi tLres TDi Yeast Vo

A. complete thermodynamic model for the determination of thie temperalure field inside the chamber must consider the effects of the conditioning system and all the thermal exchanges involved. The conditioning of the temperatures of the chamber is carried out by a cooling and heating air system which causes also a quasi stationary air flows in the charnber. The temperature field of the room has been characterized by means of the temperatures measured by eight fixed thermometers (see TI,....T8 in Fig.2). The relationship between the temperature field in the chamber and the temperature of a generic moving mould has been determined by means of the following
TMi

PROOFING CHAMBER

RISING PROCESS

A
Fig.4 Model Structure

Fig. 5 Structure of the model of the IProofing Chamber

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architecture (Fig.5). The scheme is composed of a static Neural Network which computes the temperature TA(k) of the air near a mould in function of its position in the chamber (x(k) and y(k)) and of the eight temperatures Tl(k),...,T8(k) of the fixed points. The mould temperature TM(k) in function of TA(k) is obtained by means of a linear dynamic model, which describe the thermodynamic behavior of the mould itself. This scheme was based on the following considerations: the first process (from T I ,..., T8 to TA) is highly non linear; its dynamic is negligible, due to the the fast flows of the air inside the chamber; therefore a static Neural Network represents a good choice to implement it; the second process instead is very slow compared with the first one and it must represent the thermal exchange which can be supposed linear for the ranges of the involved temperature; therefore a linear dynamic model can be considered well suited. The parameters of the blocks were identified by means of measurements carried out directly on the industrial
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plant. Data loggers were fixed to some moulds in order to get the temperatures TA(k) of the air around the mould and the temperature TM(k) of the mould itself. The data loggers were synchronized with the acquisitions of the fixed thermometers T I ,...,T8 and a rich data set was acquired. Since the Neural Network is static, to train it correctly we need only to cover the possible range of variation of the input and output variables; for this reason we have acquired a large number of input/output pairs in all the most significant operative conditions. The Neural Network was trained with an input data set composed of the eight temperature profiles of the fixed thermometers and the position of the mould (Fig.6); the target set is the air temperatures TA(k) provided by the data loggers. We used a Feed Forward NN with ten inputs, two hidden layers with ten sigmoidal neurons and an output layer with one linear neuron. The batch LevenbergMarquardt training algorithm was used. The thermodynamic model of the mould has been identified using a linear ARX model. The regressors vector is composed of the air and mould temperatures TA(k) and TM(k), measured by the data loggers (Fig.7). Since only slow dynamic is excited by the input that can be practically applied, we have considered the following ARX model with only one time constant:
TM(k)+ a, TM(k- 1) = bo TA(k)+ 4 TA(k - 1) + & TA(k - 2 ) +

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+ 4 TA(k - 3)+ b4TA(k -4)+ b, TA(k -5 )+ e ( k )

4. Model of the rising process

(1)

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Fig.6 Example of input data for the NN block

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time [SI

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The second model is composed of two blocks (Fig.8). The first one evaluates the temperature TD(k) in the center of the leavening dough basing on the temperature of the mould TM(k); the second one computes the volume rising
Yeast

V(K+I)

NEURAL
NETWORK

- . c - .

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time

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1:

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Fig. 7 Input and output of the ARX block

Fig.8 Structure of the model of the Rising Process

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of the dough V(k)in function of both temperatures.

This scheme was based on the following considerations: the first block models the thermodynamics of the dough; in particular it should relate the temperature of the mletallic mould TM(k)with the field of temperature inside the dough; due to the small dimension of the dough and the slow dynamic of the input, we reduce the complexity of the model using only two temperatures: TM(k), which represents also the dough surface temperature, and T13(k), which is the temperature in the middle of the dough; since this process is quasi-linear and dynamic we decided to model it as an ARX block; the second block, which computes the rising of the dough from the temperature field, is time dependent and non linear; so it is necessary to characterize it by means of a non linear dynamic model obtained using a bank of three layer Neural Networks with overall external feedback. Each network is used for a certain quantity of Yeast and computes the value of the volume at instant ( k + l ) in function of the temperature of the dough and of the volume at instant k. The integration of the rising speed produces the volume evolution of the dough that is used as a feedback of the Network itself. To get the data for the identification of such blocks it was necessary to reproduce the proofing process in a laboratory plant. Inside a small climatic controlled chamber it was possible to use low friction sensors able to get measurements of the volume rising (Fig.9). An example of the data sets for the ARX identification and for the NN training is displayed in Fig. 10, showing the input temperature profiles and the resulting volume. The ARX model is

composed of thie measures of TM(k), TD(k) and the actual volume V(k); the target was the volume at the next sampling instant V ( k + l ) ; therefore the network is trained to wlork as an one-step predictor:
C ( k + 1) = f(V ( k ) , T M ( k ) T , D(k))
A. skillful training

(3)

can achieve a small enough prediction error: C( k ) - V (k)l < E; E > 0 .

Unfortunately, during the current operation the actual volume V(k) is not available; therefore we use as input the estimation (k), which is fed back to the algorithm; so, the system works as a parallel model:

CONTROL STEAM INPUT

SENSOR

DATA ACQUlSlTlO

TD(k ) + a,TD( k - 1) =
= blT M ( k - 1) b2TM(k - 2) + e( k )

TM

(2)

TEMPERATURE SENSOR

VOLUME SENSOR

The neural network was trained with an input data set

Fig. 9 Laboratory plant and sensors.

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-0

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Fig. 10 Data sets for identification of ARX 2 and NN training.

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c ( k + 1 )= f ( c ( k ) , T M ( k ) , T D ( k ) )

(4)

It is well known that this scheme does not guarantee that the estimation error is bounded by an arbitrary small positive number [8] [12] [13]; however, in our case, due to the slow dynamics and to the limited time horizon during which the process must be observed, we could expect a sufficiently correct estimation. We used a Feed Forward NN with three inputs, one hidden layer with ten sigmoidal neurons and an output layer with a linear neuron. The batch LevenbergMarquardt training algorithm was used. Some test where carried out to validate this assumption, using some validation data sets. The experimental results are reported in the following figures, where the estimation f of the volume is compared with the actual measured volume V (Fig. 1 1).
30 I
1

Further developments are concerned with the improvement of the model, in order to predict not only the final volume of the dough, but also the final quality of the loaves.

References
J. Pinter. In line control in the baking industry based on instrumental measurements. Elelmezesi Ipar, 42 (8), 294-299, 1988. V. Maklyukov and L. Puchkova. Effects of proofing conditions on the quality of finished bread. Khlebopekarnaya i Konditerrskaya Promyshlennost: 3, 28-30, 1983. V. Yurchak and V. Kishen'ko. Assessment of the effectiveness of the control of dough production processes, Izvestiya Veysshikh Uchebnykh Zavedenii Pishchevaya Tekhnologiya, 4,60-62, 1984. N.Dixon and D. Kell. The control and mcasurcment of CO2 during fermentations, Journal of microbiological methods, 10(3), 155-176, 1989. Y. Kuznetsov and M. Vasin. Measuring the temperature and relative humidity regimes in the proofing chamber, Khlebopekarnaya i konditerskaya promyshlennost', 6 , 29-30, 1989. V. Chernikh and L. Puchkova. Automatic control of leavening during proofing, Baecker und Konditioner, 31(7), 215-217, 1983. Quaglia. Scienza e tecnologia della panificazione, Chiriotti Editore, Pinerolo, 1990. J. Sjoberg, Q. Zhang, L. Ljung. Nonlinear black-box modeling in system identification: a unified overview, Automatica, 31(12), 1995. L. Ljung. System Ideritifcation: Theory for the user, Prentice Hall, Englcwood Cliffs, NJ, 1987. [ 101 L. Ljung and T. Glad. Modelling of dynamic systems, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1994. [ l 11 S. Chen and S. Billings. Neural Networks for nonlinear dynamic system modelling and identification, Int. Journ. Control, 56, 319-346, 1992. [12] K.S. Narendra and A.U. Levin. Control of nonlinear dynamical systems using neural networks-part 11: observability, identification, and control, IEEE Trans Neural Networks, 7(1), 1996. [ 131 V. Piuri and C. Alippi. Experimental neural networks for prediction and identification, IEEE Trans Instrumentation and Measurement, 45(2), 1996.

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Fig. 11 Experimental results.

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5. Conclusions
In this paper we have presented a model of the proofing process in an industrial plant. The model needs measurements which can be easily acquired from the plant and can estimate the rising evolution of the dough. The model can be used to implement a predictive automatic control in order to achieve a certain mean quality of the products; furthermore, it could be employed by a human operator to predict the effect of manual control actions. The model has been implemented by means of neural networks and linear ARX systems. The identification has been carried out using measurements on the plant and of experiments in laboratory. The good fit of the results shows that the proposed architecture is well suited for the considered plant.

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