A Linguistic Decision Based Model Applied to Olive Oil Sensory Evaluation

Abstract

The evaluation is a process that analyzes elements to achieve different objectives such as quality inspection, design, marketing exploitation and other fields in industrial companies. In many of these fields the items, products, designs, etc., are evaluated according to the knowledge acquired via human senses (sight, taste, touch, smell and hearing), in such cases, the process is called Sensory Evaluation. In this type of evaluation process, an important problem arises as it is the modelling and management of uncertain knowledge, because the information acquired by our senses throughout human perceptions involves uncertainty, vagueness and imprecision. The Fuzzy Linguistic Approach [34] has showed its ability to deal with uncertainty, ambiguity, imprecision and vagueness, so it seems logic and suitable the use of the Fuzzy Linguistic Approach to model the information provided by the experts in sensory evaluation processes.

The decision analysis has been usually used in evaluation processes because it is a formal methodology that can help to achieve the evaluation objectives. In this chapter we present a linguistic evaluation model for sensory evaluation based on the decision analysis scheme that will use the Fuzzy Linguistic Approach and the 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic representation to model and manage the uncertainty and vagueness of the information acquired through the human perceptions in the sensory evaluation process. This model will be applied to some sensory evaluation processes of the Olive Oil.