Challenges in the design of formulated products: multiscale process and product design
Introduction
Consumer goods, from food to perfumes, are specialized products whose sales value depends on the perception of quality by society. The concept of quality is different from some products to others. For detergents, quality is given by cleanliness of clothes, for drugs their performance is assessed by their capability of curing or treating a disease, while for food it is the taste and nutritional properties. In recent years, many studies have analyzed the design of products from molecular design to specialized chemical products [1••,2, 3, 4,5•,6]. Formulated products are a special category and are present in the food, agrochemicals, pharmaceutical, consumer products, [7,8,9•,10•,11••,12,13,14•,15,16]. These products are typically manufactured by mixing a large number of ingredients. While they share the same production scheme as bulk chemicals, from the raw materials to their distribution, a larger number of agents are involved in their production. First of all, some raw materials for formulated products are functional molecules with a complex supply chain of their own. The production process itself is challenging, since the objective is that the product achieves properties that allow the consumer to select this product above others. These properties must be achieved while keeping production costs low, so that the product is economically competitive. Since customer needs change over time and with the place where products are sold, the optimization of the process becomes complex. The competition is fierce resulting in the need for an efficient distribution chain in both economic and environmental terms.
The design of chemical products consists of mainly three stages: a) Identification of the consumer needs. b) Translation of these needs into chemical/physical properties. c) Building and manufacturing a product that possesses these features [10•,11••,12,13,14•]. The formulated product and process design includes multiple fields of expertise, from biology and chemistry, to engineering, operation research and marketing and the need to address them all from a multiscale perspective due to the various space and time scales involved, integrating concepts of uncertainty and heuristics. As a result, product design has become a field of interest within chemical and process engineering because the principles that are involved are common with the expertise and skills developed within the field. Furthermore, society is more demanding than ever.
This work discusses and present the concepts, approaches and challenges to deal with the design of formulated products from the systems engineering point of view beyond traditional practices based on consumer tests and market analysis. Chemical and process engineering can play an important role because of the tools and methodologies at their disposal. The work is divided in three major sections including an overview of the market issues involved in process design, the mathematical modelling techniques that can be useful to address the problem that represents product design all the way from the right ingredients to the supply chain, not forgetting the production process and finally the challenges that the integrated product design problem poses on us.
Section snippets
Market evaluation
Products are market oriented. They aim at meeting the demand and expectations of consumers; therefore, they are driven by the market in terms of properties, features and price. In this section we comment on these issues and how they affect the design of a formulated product starting with the identification of the consumer needs.
Mathematical formulation of product design
Product design is an area within process system engineering that helps develop products in a systematic way, using chemistry, physics and engineering to provide the basis that characterizes the product properties so as to be able to engineer products but including concepts of operation research to address the market characteristics. To achieve that goal, mathematical optimization is a powerful tool and an umbrella to develop methods and models aiming at the design of products with desired
Challenges and future approaches: multiscale process and product design
The design of formulated products is a multidisciplinary problem requiring different skills from basic science and engineering to marketing, that presents not only different objectives that contradict each other, product prices versus performance, public acceptance, environmental and policy issues [89] and risks but also uncertainty at different levels, exogenous due to demand and/or supply [106] and endogenous due to the development of novel ingredients and technologies [20]. Furthermore,
Conflict of interest statement
Nothing declared.
References and recommended reading
Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:
• of special interest
•• of outstanding interest
Acknowledgements
P&G and GIR PSEM3 USAL for funding the research.
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