Mihai Caramihai and Irina Severin

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter http://dx. doi. org/10.5772/55362

1. Introduction

The bioprocess advancement is determined by the living cells capabilities and characteristics, the bioreactor performance as well as by the cultivation media composition and the main parameters evolution. The high metabolic network complexity inside the cells often determine very sophisticated, non-linear growth and product formation kinetics, with further consequences on the bioprocess behavior, but at the same time on the product quality and yield.

The key issue of this rather complicated situation is the use of modeling and further on of computer assisted control as a powerful tool for bioprocess improving. The process models, as relationships of the input, output and inner variables, though incomplete and simplified, can be effective to describe the phenomena and the influences of great importance for control, optimization and better theoretical knowledge. The function of any biological model is to describe the metabolic reactions rates and their stoichiometry on the basis of bioreactor conditions, with the main difficulties-the identification of principal factors affecting cellular growth and bioproduct formation, and the building up of a suitable model structure for the intracellular processes.

Moreover the scheduling, supervision and automatic control in modern bioprocessing is done by advanced process control systems, where all the functions are implemented in software (in accordance with the Figure 1). The main bioprocess control attributes are: handling of off-line analyses; recipe and scheduling; high level overall control; state and parameters estimation; simulation; prediction; optimization.

For the industrial developments the central and manifold objective of the computer control is the realization of the economic interests in assuring high operational stability, process reproducibility and increased product yield together with the maintaining of rigorous safety and the implementation of the GMP or environmental regulations, important requests in modern biomanufacture imposed by the product quality improving needs.

© 2013 Caramihai and Severin, licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.