Design of optimal wine distillation recipes using multi-criteria decision-making techniques

Abstract In this work, dynamic multi-objective optimization and multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques were applied to design recipes for optimal alembic wine distillations. The optimization problem considered eight objectives associated with sensorial quality, food safety, productivity, and efficiency. Through correlation analysis of the optimal solutions, it was possible to reduce the original objectives into four conflicting objectives. Seven MCDM methods were tested to select the best recipes considering five scenarios. In the equal priority scenario, each multi-criterion decision-making algorithm selected different solutions. In scenarios with higher priority for a single objective, most multi-criteria decision-making algorithms selected similar or identical solutions. A well balanced performance was achieved when a high priority was assigned to ethanol recovery. This work´s methodology can be easily adapted to define recipes for the optimal operation of any fruit batch distillation process.