For historic reasons, industrial knowledge of reproducibility and restrictions imposed by regulations, open-loop feeding control approaches dominate in industrial fed-batch cultivation processes. In this study, a generic gray box biomass modeling procedure uses relative entropy as a key to approach the posterior similarly to how prior distribution approaches the posterior distribution by the multivariate path of Lagrange multipliers, for which a description of a nuisance time is introduced. The ultimate purpose of this study was to develop a numerical semi-global convex optimization procedure that is dedicated to the calculation of feeding rate time profiles during the fed-batch cultivation processes. The proposed numerical semi-global convex optimization of relative entropy is neither restricted to the gray box model nor to the bioengineering application. From the bioengineering application perspective, the proposed bioprocess design technique has benefits for both the regular feed-forward control and the advanced adaptive control systems, in which the model for biomass growth prediction is compulsory. After identification of the gray box model parameters, the options and alternatives in controllable industrial biotechnological processes are described. The main aim of this work is to achieve high reproducibility, controllability, and desired process performance. Glucose concentration measurements, which were used for the development of the model, become unnecessary for the development of the desired microbial cultivation process.
The purpose of this study is to introduce an improved Luedeking–Piret model that represents a structurally simple biomass concentration approach. The developed routine provides acceptable accuracy when fitting experimental data that incorporate the target protein concentration of Escherichia coli culture BL21 (DE3) pET28a in fed-batch processes. This paper presents system identification, biomass, and product parameter fitting routines, starting from their roots of origin to the entropy-related development, characterized by robustness and simplicity. A single tuning coefficient allows for the selection of an optimization criterion that serves equally well for higher and lower biomass concentrations. The idea of the paper is to demonstrate that the use of fundamental knowledge can make the general model more common for technological use compared to a sophisticated artificial neural network. Experimental validation of the proposed model involved data analysis of six cultivation experiments compared to 19 experiments used for model fitting and parameter estimation.